Japan’s ambition to resume its contentious Antarctic whale hunts has run into objections from the government of New Zealand, an anti-whaling nation that had supported a UN legal ruling against the hunts in March.
Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, met his New Zealand counterpart John Key on Monday at the start of a diplomatic visit to New Zealand and Australia, another Pacific country where anti-whaling sentiment is widespread.
Mr Abe is hoping to focus on trade and defence issues, but could not avoid the question of how Japan intends to respond to March’s ruling by the International Court of Justice, the UN’s legal arm, that it was abusing a loophole in the 1982 global moratorium on commercial whaling that allows hunting for scientific research.