Human enemies of whales

Japanese whalings PR companies

Shandwick

By that I of course mean this rebranded company


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You wonder why people say
1) Whales eat all the fish
2) We dont tell you not to eat meat pie
3) Hindu like the cow
?
Well all 3 were multi-million dollar marketting campaigns.

Of course the new wave of bought mouthpieces like Glenn and Flan man are paid to spout the "Minke eat krill" argument... which yes is true... but no does not mean that all the Minke need to die to save the Blue Whale from extinction. Perhaps instead the Japanese could cut back on harvesting krill?

Tele-Press Associates

These are the fellas responsible for constantly attacking the sanctuary.

You hear Japanese people claiming there is no IWC Southern Ocean whale sanctuary and thats Tele-Press in action.

Omeka

Japan's NZ based PR cronies, headed by Glenn Inwood and co.

Parliamentary Whaling League

These are the powerful men who keep Japan a pro-whaling nation.

Many environmentalists around the world hope that the whaling issue in Japan will simply fade with the now moribund industry. In Japan, though, the political prowhaling lobby has never been stronger.


Japan's domestic campaign is backed by the 98-strong Parliamentary Whaling League (PWL), whose members include Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, LDP high-flier Yoshimasa Hayashi (both from the whaling district of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture), Foreign Minister Taro Aso and Yokohama Mayor Hiroshi Nakata.

All the major political parties back whaling -- even the Communists -- and the Diet boasts just one antiwhaling lawmaker, Okinawa's Shokichi Kina. Supporting the antiwhaling cause in Japan would be as politically popular domestically as cheering on whaling boats in the Houses of Parliament in London.

Much as Japan's politicians champion logic and science in the service of their cause, however, it is clear that nationalism is one of the pillars that props up the campaign. Many of the most active prowhalers are on the right of the political spectrum, and the vast majority of the PWL has no electoral or commercial ties to whaling. In fact, only around 10 percent come from districts with a direct connection to the whaling industry.

Discussions in Japan about the loss of whaling are inevitably tinged with loss of national pride.

This from Hamada: "We're talking about managed whaling, so why are we being told we can't take any; that hunting whales is wrong? We were told to stop eating whalemeat because of pressure from abroad, and that it is barbarous. They eat dogs in South Korea and monkeys in China, and they call that barbarous too. We should start by accepting the other side's culinary culture and avoid telling them what to do."

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Many of the commission's 21 newest members, such as the Marshall Islands and St. Kitts & Nevis, have no history of whaling, while several, including Mongolia and Mali, have no coastlines. All the newer members are developing countries in desperate need of foreign investment, and nearly half are from West Africa.

This power shift could clearly only have been achieved by a sustained campaign to win the support of so-called neutral nations in the IWC -- a fact acknowledged by leading prowhaling lawmakers such as the LDP's high-flying Yoshimasa Hayashi.

Because foreign aid was already used, in Hayashi's words, "with certain conditions," and was "even given to antiwhaling countries," he and other supporters of the Parliamentary Whaling League insisted that whaling -- a matter of "important national interest" -- should be shoved near the top of the list of conditions.

Indeed, the Foreign Office's own records show officials from the prime minister down raising the whaling issue in meeting after meeting with foreign dignitaries. As prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, for example, expressed his gratitude to the president of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanas Geyer, at a summit meeting in June 2004. One month later, Japan canceled Nicaraguan debt to the tune of $ 118.4 million. Japan's whaling diplomacy has been built on hundreds of similar approaches.

Hayashi explains the impact of this strategy:

"I think most of the countries that have newly joined [the IWC], including the Caribbean, African and Central American countries like Nicaragua, have joined as the result of joint efforts by the prowhaling camp. We cooperate and recruit new countries. You know, nobody joins without an invitation or lobbying (laughs). When the moratorium was passed we were less than one quarter, so now we finally have a majority."

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Mr. Yoshimasa Hayashi - Member of the Japanese Parliament, Secretary General of the Parliamentarian League for Whaling.

Hayashi YoshimasaA leading member of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, Yoshimasa Hayashi is the leader of the Pro-Whaling League in the Japanese Diet. As such he is maybe the most influential Japanese politician in connection with the whaling issue.

I argue we need a complete list of all the members of the Parliamentary Whaling League along with their contact email and address.

Glenn Inwood

Glenn Inwood is the founder of Omeka Public Relations, a small PR firm based in Wellington, New Zealand.

Background

A biographical note on his company's website states that he "has written and edited for newspapers that include the Christchurch Star, The Press in Christchurch and the Evening Post in Wellington, and produced Radio New Zealand's flagship programme Morning Report".

It also states that in 2000 he won an award from thye Public Relations Institute of New Zealand for "Stop The Wall", "a campaign on behalf of Waterfront Watch, Wellington. (Winner of PRINZ Crisis Communications Award and PRINZ Supreme Award 2000)".

Inwood and the World Council of Whalers

In September 200O Inwood was working four days a week as a press secretary for Lianne Dalziel, who was Immigration Minister in the New Zealand Labour Party government. The other day a week it was reported that Inwood worked for Morris Communications, where he was working on the account of the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission. The Fisheries Commission was hosting the 3rd Annual General Assembly of the World Council of Whalers in Nelson in November 2000. After Inwood's dual role as a Ministerial press adviser and speaker at a pro-whaling conference was raised in parliament, Prime Minister Helen Clark directed that Inwood not to attend. On September 28, 2000 Inwood resigned his position as Dalziel's press adviser.

One of the other speakers at the WCW conference was Eugene LaPointe, from the International Wildlife Management Consortium. In conjunction with the WCW conference, an inaugural general assembly of the Sustainable Use Parliamentarians Union (SUPU) was held and chaired by then U.S. Congressman Richard Pombo.


Working for the Whalers

In March 2003, Inwood was the organiser of a tour of Australasia by the former secretary of the International Whaling Commission, Dr Ray Gambell, who was urging an end to the moratorium on commercial whaling. The tour was sponsored by the World Council of Whalers. The New Zealand Herald identified Inwood as a PR consultant to the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission and Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), the Japanese agency which is responsible for its commercial whaling operations. As of 2007 Inwood continues his work with the ICR. [2]

In January 2006 the New Zealand Herald reported that Inwood also works for Te Ohu Kaimoana, "the sole voting shareholder in Aotearoa Fisheries (AFL), which owns a 50 per cent shareholding in Sealord. The other half-share in Sealord is owned by the Japanese company, Nissui, which is a major shareholder in Japan's Antarctic whaling fleet. [3]


Contact Details

Omeka Public Relations
PO Box 12-490 Thorndon, Wellington
New Zealand
Ph +64 21 498 010
Fax +64 21 787 570
E-mail omeka AT omeka.com

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The Institute of Cetacean Research's tireless New Zealand spokesman is a controversial figure in his homeland, writes Ben Cubby.

TO ENVIRONMENTALISTS he is a 21st-century Tokyo Rose; to Japanese whalers, a hired gun.

Glenn Inwood, the Japanese whaling industry's embattled spin doctor, has one of the toughest public relations gigs in the world: selling commercial whaling to the planet.

A former press secretary to a New Zealand cabinet minister, Mr Inwood resigned in 2000 after the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, found his connections to the whaling industry distasteful.

His tireless promotion of whaling for Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research has made him a controversial figure in his homeland. But the normally garrulous Mr Inwood was reluctant to discuss his role when contacted by the Herald.

"I understand the news interest from you guys, but it really doesn't matter that there's a New Zealander talking about whaling," he said. "It's really not about me; it's about whales."

Mr Inwood is a seasoned public relations operative, but also a true believer in the whaler's cause, according to people who have worked with him.

Drawing on his Maori heritage, he believes hunting whales is a respectable tradition. He has little respect for the Australian Government's position on whaling which, he has written, has allowed emotions to interfere with common sense and international law.

"Its stance at the [International Whaling Commission] reflects an emotive environmental movement that has continued unchecked for 20 years or more, and has even been encouraged for reasons of political expediency, simply because there is no longer an Australian whaling constituency," he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Canberra Times in 2005.

But hunting whales also provides Mr Inwood with his own bread and butter.

The New Zealand Herald reported in 2006 that he has worked as a consultant for Te Ohu Kaimoana, an organisation devoted to advancing Maori fishing interests. It is also reportedly the sole voting shareholder in Aotearoa Fisheries, which in turn owns half of the major New Zealand seafood company Sealord. The other half is owned by a Japanese company, Nissui, which is also a shareholder in Japan's whaling fleet.

An experienced public relations agent, Michael Smith, whose former company took on a contract for Japanese whalers nine years ago, likened Mr Inwood's role to "representing seal clubbers".

Mr Smith's firm, Shandwick International, ran into trouble running a campaign on behalf of the Japanese Whaling Association. The company also had a contract with the International Fund for Animal Welfare to run a campaign in Britain against fox hunting - a deal which Shandwick lost when its whaling work became known to the animal-welfare activists.

In retrospect, it had probably been a mistake to take the brief, Mr Smith said. "It was just a case of the Japanese were sick of coming to Australia and getting ambushed everywhere, they wanted to get their own story out."

Mr Smith, who is not pro-whaling, said Mr Inwood would continue to face an uphill battle to sell his message, but that it would be unlikely to affect the whales themselves.

"I don't think the Japanese really care that much about public opinion in Australia."

Bob Burton, author of Inside Spin and an observer of the whaling industry's twists and turns, said Mr Inwood was a valuable asset for the Institution of Cetacean Research but the public relations battle could not be won.

"It's a bit like the asbestos industry - they are defending the indefensible, and the strategy is to keep on stalling. In the long term, though, it's hard to see anything other than the strategy unravelling."

Tim Flannery

JAPAN, NORWAY, ICELAND