Junichi Sato (Greenpeace Japan Whales campaign coordinator) holds up one of ten pieces of whale meat weighing 23.5 kilos in total, obtained by Greenpeace during an investigation into large-scale theft of meat from the Japanese government-sponsored Southern Ocean whaling programme.
A four month investigation by Greenpeace exposed claims by current and former crew that thousands of dollars worth of meat is stolen each year. Officials from the government's Institute of Cetacean Research and the fleet operators Kyodo Senpaku, know about the embezzlement but ignore it, even though it is the Japanese tax payer who funds the expeditions.