Astonishingly, as the world at last begins to awaken to the disastrous depletion and degradation of its natural environment, Agence France-Presse ( AFP ) has reported that Japan is still persisting in fighting for its "right" to commercially hunt and kill our oceans' already-decimated population of whales.

The AFP report also revealed that, ahead of this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) scheduled to take place in Anchorage, Alaska on May 28-31, Japan has threatened to quit the body unless the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling is overturned "within several years".

In fact, as the Washington Post editorialised in June last year, Japan and its fellow renegade whaling nations, Norway and Iceland, have never stopped hunting whales, and have been killing more of them than ever.

The Post also drew attention to the fact that Japan was no longer confining the killing to "relatively plentiful" minke whales, but had resumed its slaughter of endangered fin and sperm whales and had plans to hunt humpbacks as well.

Even more ominous for environmentalist is that, at the IWC meeting in 2006, pro-whaling nations achieved their first majority in 20 years with a 33-32 vote in favour of a "resolution" declaring the moratorium on whale-hunting "no longer necessary".

Though the whalers' "victory" on that occasion was only symbolic, as the lifting of the moratorium on their activities requires a two-thirds majority of IWC members, Japan continues to lobby - or as some claim bribe - many small, impoverished nations with Overseas Development Aid grants to support what it claims to be its "harvesting" of whales for "research".

As readers with long memories will recall, this financial pressure was admitted several years ago by Japan's then delegate to the IWC, Masayuki Komatsu, who created waves of protest around the civilised world by going on to explain that Japan was forced to resort to economic persuasion of other nations to its point of view because "it doesn't have an army", and that in any case minke whales are nothing but "cockroaches of the sea".

Komatsu's remarks struck many people at the time as not simply candid, but outright contemptuous, not to say contemptible. Recalling, as they inevitably did, that back when Japan did have an army it declared open season not just on whales but, with the exception of its Nazi and Fascist allies, the whole wide world of non-Nipponese humans. And then proceeded to treat other peoples, especially fellow Asians, as if they were so many cockroaches of the land, fair game for wholesale enslavement, torture and slaughter.

Of course Nippon was comprehensively disabused of its notion that other humans, orientals and occidentals alike, were nothing more than cockroaches, by its comprehensive defeat in 1945, and has never been permitted an army, or at least an overseas one, since.

Still seeking mastery

But however bankrupt its dreams of martial supremacy, Japan has never abandoned its fantasies of racial and cultural superiority or its aim to achieve, one way or another, what it views as its rightful place at the pinnacle of the divine order. So following its abject failure to maintain the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by force of arms, it has since sought mastery over the peoples, nations and natural resources of the Pacific through sheer spending power.

Or, if necessary, as those of us who recall that Pearl Harbour wasn't just a movie are vividly aware, by subterfuge. Like its weasel "research" programme on whales that actually boils down to nothing more than determining how much oil their blubber yields and how delicious their meat tastes to the eccentric patrons of niche-market restaurants. As if a nation so ingenious as to be able to bestow on mankind such wonders as karaoke, Anime cartoons and the Walkman hasn't the smarts to cook-up synthetic whale oils and flavourings, and thereby render whaling completely redundant.

In the past I've tried hard to overcome my prejudices against Japanese arrogance, avarice and prevarication. I've even taken a leaf out of Japanese school textbooks and tried forgiving if not forgetting such long-ago lapses as the rape of Nanking, the Burma Railway and the enslavement of so-called Comfort Women.

Let bygones be bygones, right? So for years I had myself a whale of a time snapping away with my Nikon, staring mindlessly at the screen of my Sony Trinitron, off-roading around my farm in a Toyota Landcruiser and hacking around the highways and byways of Australia in my trusty Mitsubishi Lancer.

But what with all this whaling business, I've a rising urge to source my electronic and automotive products from countries that show a great deal more respect for international treaties and goodwill, not to mention other races and cultures, than Japan seems to be able to manage. As long as it continues to view the world as its oyster and the oceans as its killing-grounds, I'm sure as hell not shelling-out any more cash to provide it with economic ammunition for recruiting self-seeking supporters for its war on whales.

As for Norway and Iceland, the other two nations that claim their right to continue whaling on the grounds that it's part of their cultural heritage, both are so insignificant and unproductive of exports worth boycotting that all I can think of is to keep criticising them for as long as they persist in committing their marine atrocities.

But Japan most certainly has a consumer economy, so maybe money can be made to talk loud enough to achieve more concern for ecology.

Or to put it another way, if enough of its foreign customers can be persuaded to buy elsewhere, perhaps the loss of yen will eventually outweigh Japan's yearning to make a killing out of slaughtering our oceans' endangered species.