Japan will propose setting up an organization of whaling nations at a two-day meeting starting Tuesday in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, involving 27 countries and a region who support the hunts, sources said Monday.
But it is uncertain if the proposal will be adopted at the meeting as participants have yet to fully coordinate views on it, the sources added.
Japan plans to make the proposal against the backdrop of the rift in the International Whaling Commission between pro- and antiwhaling members.
The annual IWC meeting in Morocco in June ended in a decision to defer until next year a proposal presented by the IWC chairman and vice chairman that would effectively allow Japan and other countries to resume commercial whaling under the commission's control.
Following the IWC assembly, Masahiko Yamada, the minister of agriculture, forestry and fisheries at the time, said, "To create a new organization is an option."
More than 30 high-ranking officials from the 27 countries in Europe, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and the Caribbean, including Norway, South Korea and Russia, as well as Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, will attend the meeting in the whaling port of Shimonoseki.
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