Japan opens international whaling meeting with call for resumption of commercial hunts

Of course it does. Whale meat is delicious, and who cares about endangered species?

The claim that whale overpopulation is causing the depletion of fish stocks is ridiculous. First, the whale population today is still much lower than it was even a few hundred years ago. Whales didn't overfish the sea before human predation; it's very hard to see how a whale population still only a fragment of what it once was could cause a problem. Second, a lot of the whales that the Japanese want to hunt are baleen whales, which eat plankton, not fish.