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Recently released poll results have shown that the support for Japan’s whaling program among its people remains strong—60 percent of those surveyed felt the program was justified—but that just 14 percent of Japanese actually consume whale meat. Just four percent said they ate whale meat “sometimes”, 10 percent said they ate it “fairly infrequently,” and 48 percent said they had not eaten it for “a long time.” Thirty-seven percent had never eaten whale meat.

Conducted by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the poll showed that just 23 percent of people opposed the country’s controversial “scientific” whaling program.

After the United Nations’ top court ordered Japan to stop killing whales in the Antarctic, the country suspended the hunt in the Southern Ocean for the 2014–15 season, and suggested it would make its Antarctic whaling mission “more scientific” in future. Japan’s “research whaling” in the northwestern Pacific, however, continued as planned on April 26.

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