(from "ISANA" No. 7, 1992)

Kikuo Ishiwatari
Vice President
Suisansha

The movements of Olympic Challenger had been traced by two Japanese fleets. Heihachiro Kawamura, senior inspector on board of Nippon Suisan's Tonan Maru notified his counterpart on the Nisshin Maru fleet, Keijiro Maeda, that he had sighted the buoy of a foreign fleet floating on a humpback whale caught before its open season. Soon a 600-ton catcher boat, trailing black smoke, came into sight. From the bridge, I could see some other boats chasing whales. They were unmistakably the fleet of the Olympic Challenger, with white circle and the Olympic mark on their funnels. The Nisshin Maru fleet appeared to have crossed the trackline of the Olympic Challenger steaming westward to the Ross Sea. The Nisshin Maru fleet could be in a disadvantageous position if it were involved in a competition with the Olympic Challenger, and poor catches over the past few days might have been due to the activities of the pirate. On January 24th, our fleet had caught four blue and fin whales, while on January 25th - the day before the Olympic Challenger was sighted - we took no blue whales and just three fin whales. The Olympic Challenger then moved westward and competed with Taiyo's Kinjo Maru fleet.

Though registered in Panama, the Olympic Challenger was actually owned and operated by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis. From the time of its first expedition in 1950, the fleet is believed to have earned $ 4.2 million. Before competing with the Nisshin Maru fleet, the Olympic Challenger attempted illegal whale catch in the waters off Chile and came under fire from the Chilean Navy. A German engineer onboard the fleet's expedition in the west coast of South Africa in September the same year, later confessed that "all the whales caught today were blue whales before their open season. What happens if it is exposed?" According to his record, 96% of sperm whales and 56% of blue whales caught were undersized, and 580 whales were harvested in the closed areas.

As a correspondent of Suisan Keizai Shimbun (Fishery Economic News), I had joined the Kinjo Maru from which I observed the opening of sperm and fin whaling at midnight January 7th. I then moved to No.16 Fumi Maru, commanded by chief gunner Moriichi Izui. Later I moved to tanker Chigusa Maru steaming eastward toward Nisshin Maru, and transferred to the mothership operating near Balleny Islands. I was lucky to witness foreign fleet during my first Antarctic expedition.

At the 1952 annual meeting of the IWC in Moscow, Japan harshly reproached the illegal actions of the Olympic Challenger. A Norwegian newspaper ran a photo of the piracy, and the Norwegian government elicited a court injunction to seize 6,300 tons of whale oil the Olympic Challenger landed at Hamburg. The oil was forfeited at Rotterdam.

Apparently as a result of this incident, Onassis decided to get out of whaling and sold his entire fleet to Kyokuyo Hogei (now Kyokuyo Co.) for $ 8.5 million. This became the No.2 Kyokuyo fleet, which was instrumental in reviving the company's whaling in the Antarctic in the postwar years.

The sale of Olympic Challenger was the first in a succession of sales by Western operators to Japan, which purchased there fleets to offset the effect of reduced catch quotas. The fleets acquired by Japan were: the Abraham Larsen of South Africa by Taiyo (No.2 Nisshin Maru) in November 1957, the Balaena of Britain by Kyokuyo (No.3 Kyokuyo Maru) in September 1969, the Kosmos III of Norway by Taiyo (No.3 Nisshin Maru) in September 1960 and the Bromendar of the Netherlands by Nitto Hogei Co. (now Del Mar Co.)(Nichiei Maru) in March 196l. In addition, from 1962 to 1964, Taiyo, Nissui and Kyokuyo jointly purchased rights to catch quotas (but not the vessels) from the Southern Venturer, the Southern Harvester and the Willem Barendsz. The total cost of purchasing of these nine fleets and quota rights came to about 27 billion yen.

These sell-offs were apparently prompted by successive reductions of catch quotas. As non-Japanese fleets were interested solely in obtaining oil from whaling, the reduced quotas made it increasingly difficult for them to make ends meet. Japanese fleets, however, utilized their catch fully and could thus continue operating backed by strong demand for frozen whale meat at home, until commercial whaling moratorium was enforced.

What we see here is a very egocentric attitude on the part of the West, where factory-type whaling had been invented. Western nations first sold their whaling fleets with catch quotas at a high price to the Japanese, and then pressed for quota reductions and ultimately prohibition of whaling.

According to international whaling statistics, over a period of 40 years in the Antarctic, Norway caught 82,000 blue whales, 210,000 fin whales, 11,000 humpback whales and 18,400 sei whales. This is equivalent to 280,000 blue whales based on the BWU (blue whale unit) conversion system. Had whale meat (red meat and blubber) been collected from these whales, they would have yielded between 4.2 and 5.6 million tons (assuming an average meat yield per whale of 15 - 20 tons).

Similarly, over a span of 3l years, British whalers caught the equivalent of 126,000 BWUs, which would have yielded from 1.89 to 2.5 million tons of whale meat. Instead this animal protein was discarded at sea in violation of the provisions of the whaling convention the British themselves had helped establish. To this one must add the virtually incalculable catches of the Olympic Challenger.

And then there were the Yankee whalers who ravaged the world's oceans for nearly two centuries and depleted baleen whale resources in Japanese coastal waters. Western nations suspended whaling when petroleum was discovered. It was this egocentric attitude that prompted the vote to ban commercial whaling moratorium at the U.N. Conference on Human Environment in 1972, and which subsequently led to anomalous management of the IWC which we see today.

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