Peter Bethune has been given a suspended jail sentence for trying to stop a whale cull in Japan where he is despised and harangued
ARRESTED AT sea, taken to Tokyo in handcuffs and yesterday given a two-year suspended jail sentence for trying to stop Japan’s annual whale cull, Peter Bathing has become a controversial hero of the environmental movement. But in Japan, where he was on trial for boarding a whaling ship and assaulting a crew member, he is despised and harangued by nationalists, who call him an eco-terrorist.
Bethune, who is being deported back to his native New Zealand, was accused of throwing a mild acid and injuring a member of the crew of the Shonan Maru IIthat collided with his powerboat a month earlier during clashes in the Antarctic Ocean. The New Zealander's trial was the first in Japan against a member of the Sea Shepherd Conservationist Society, a US direct action group, and has attracted huge media attention.
Japanese ultra-nationalists picketed his daily court appearances and staged noisy protests outside the New Zealand and Australian embassies in Tokyo. Some called for Bethune to be “hanged”. Australia announced last month that it is upping the ante in the anti-whaling battle by following through on a long-standing threat to take Japan to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The legal and high seas skirmishes fill the vacuum left by the failure to find a solution to the two-decade war over Japan’s whaling programme.
A compromise proposal to solve the dispute disintegrated at the annual conference of the International Whaling Commission in Agadir, Morocco last month. Observers fear the failure will open the door to more direct action by conservationists and their nationalist foes, who claim whaling is part of Japanese culture.
Last week, a Japanese court issued a rare ban against demonstrators who have hounded screenings of an Oscar-winning documentary exposing the country's infamous annual dolphin cull. Yokohama regional court ordered members of a right-wing protest group to stay away from a theatre showing The Cove, which depicts the slaughter of thousands of dolphins every year in the picturesque fishing town of Taiji.
Bullhorn-wielding ultra-nationalists have repeatedly descended on theatres that screen the movie, denouncing it as anti-Japanese.
The nationalists say the documentary is a front for Sea Shepherd, which they denounce as a “terrorist” group.
A general Japanese release of The Cove has been stalled for more than a year amid fears of protests and even violent retribution against cinemas. But film distributor Unplugged has decided to take on the protesters on condition that the movie’s makers block the faces of the local people it depicts. More than 20 theatres have agreed to screen it after a group of directors and publishers stood up to defend it, turning the controversy into a free speech debate.
Japan, meanwhile, has placed Sea Shepherd head Paul Watson on an international wanted list, part of a stepped-up campaign against eco-warriors who target the whaling industry. Japan's coast guard accuses Watson of ordering the attack on its Antarctic whaling fleet earlier this year. Sea Shepherd's boat, Ady Gil, captained by Bethune, was destroyed in subsequent clashes when it collided with a whaling ship.
Bethune was found guilty of obstructing the hunt and injuring a whaling crew member in Tokyo district court yesterday.
Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki also face lengthy custodial sentences this summer on charges of trespass and theft after they tried to expose the misappropriation of whale meat aboard Japan's main whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru. The two intercepted one of dozens of boxes of whale meat allegedly sent illegally by the whaling crew to addresses across Japan.
Sato and Suzuki took these allegations to journalists at a press conference before handing the meat over to the police and demanding an investigation. The authorities responded by ignoring the claims and launching a ferocious campaign against Greenpeace.
Bethune called his trial "judicial rape" from the Tokyo prison where he was being held. "There has been this procession of rehearsed statements from their side," said Bethune, flanked by a prison guard during an interview in the bunker-like Tokyo detention centre. He admitted charges including trespassing and disruption of commerce but denied assaulting a crew member of the Shonan Maru IIwith a bottle of butyric acid. Last month the whaler testified that he needed a week of medical treatment after the acid splashed him on the face, an accusation Bethune denies.
Australia and New Zealand accuse Japan of commercial whaling in what both countries consider a whale sanctuary. Tokyo calls the annual cull “scientific whaling” and says neither country has any legal claim over the southern oceans, a defence Bethune angrily rejected.
“They’re hunting whales in my backyard,” he said.
“They’ve got no right to be there and like a lot of people I find it deeply offensive.”
Sea Shepherd founder Watson said recently that Bethune “is being used as a political football by right-wing nationalists in Japan”.
Bethune was captaining the powerboat Ady Gilin January when it was sliced in half by the Shonan Maru IIin what Sea Shepherd calls a deliberate attack. Bethune climbed aboard the Japanese vessel the following month, intending, he says, to arrest its captain for attempted murder and bill him for the sinking of his ship, but was himself arrested and taken back to Tokyo for trial.
“My aim was to make life awkward for them,” said Bethune. “We’ve succeeded. This has caused enormous damage and extreme embarrassment to Japan.”