Japan's Prime Minister says he wants to resume whaling, despite the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) ruling three months ago that Tokyo's state-sponsored whaling program was not for "research" as advertised, but was for commercial purposes.

“I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research in order to obtain scientific data indispensable for the management of whale resources,” said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It puts Japan right back to where it was before the ruling – at odds with international opinion and conservation groups which were hoping that Japan would stick with its word at the time of the ruling, that it would back off.  The ICJ came to its ruling because Australia’s argument that Japan’s research whaling program didn’t seem to produce any meaningful research, despite the killing of around 3,600 Minke Whales since 2005.

Although Abe has ordered the redesigning of the whaling program, and complains that international critics don’t understand Japanese culture, whaling isn’t fully accepted at home.  Japanese eat only about one percent of the whale meat that they did during its peak in the 1960s.  In 2013, the government realized it was holding on to 5,000 metric ton of unsold whale meat, and tried to auction it off.  75 percent of it went unsold.