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Environmentalists are outraged by the Administration's compromise. "It's an absolute sellout," says Craig Van Note, executive vice president of a Washington-based consortium of animal-welfare groups. Thomas Garrett, the head of the U.S. delegation to the IWC's 1981 meeting, agrees. "What the Administration is actually doing is caving in to Japanese pressure," he says. "The U.S. has not won a promise from Japan to end commercial whaling and may not even have a deal to limit sperm whaling." Conservation groups have sent U.S. Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige a letter documenting Japanese whale kills this year and urging him to "certify" the Japanese as violators of the IWC agreement. If he does not, they say they will take the Government to court. William Rogers, who represents the environmentalists, notes that a lawsuit would be "based on the premise that any commitment by the Secretary of Commerce not to certify Japa nesesperm whaling would be an unlawful agreement not to enforce U.S. law."
In the future, Japan can expect to meet more protests from save-the-whalers. The activist conservation group Greenpeace, for one, is organizing a boycott of Japan Air Lines by attempting to pressure travel agents in twelve countries served by JAL to ticket passengers on other carriers. But there is some fear that the protests will be too late and that the U.S. reluctance to censure the Japanese might encourage other nations to resume whaling. That could bring to an end the decade-long effort to save sperm whales from depletion. In Hasui's view, that is not a problem because, he says, the annual Japanese catch is a tiny fraction of the estimated 200,000 sperm whales in the oceans. Nor is there a substitute for the whale: in Japan, whalemeat is a prized delicacy.
—By Peter Stoler Reported by Neil Gross/Tokyo and Christophei Redman/Washington