Whale meat: from 233,000 tonnes in 1962 to 1,000 tonnes today

In 1962 Japan consumed 233,000 tonnes of whale meat a year. In 2021 it consumed 1,000. No other food has seen such a fall in a developed country, and that curve says more than any argument about what commercial whaling has become.

A post-war protein

Japan came out of the Second World War drained and undernourished. Livestock farming was destroyed and imports were out of reach. The whale, for its part, was there, and the American occupation explicitly encouraged the resumption of Antarctic whaling to feed the population.

The meat then became the cheapest protein in the country. It entered school canteens, usually fried in batter, and stayed there into the 1970s. A whole generation associates it with the taste of school, which accounts for part of the emotional weight the subject carries today.

The figure that gives the measure: in 1960, a Japanese person ate 5.2 kilos of meat a year across all categories, of which 1.6 kilos of whale. It was the country’s leading source of meat, ahead of pork, beef and chicken.

The collapse

The peak was reached in 1962. Japanese industrial livestock farming then gathered pace, pork and chicken became plentiful and cheap, and whale lost its advantage: it had not been preferred, it had been available.

The fall has been continuous since the 1970s. It predates the International Whaling Commission moratorium, adopted in 1982 and in force from 1986: the market had already collapsed on its own.

The present orders of magnitude leave little room for argument. Around 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes a year, set against the 2.6 million tonnes of chicken and 1.27 million tonnes of beef consumed in the same country. Per head of population, whale meat consumption rounds to zero kilos.

Who still eats it

Three very different situations coexist, and confusing them distorts the debate.

Commercial whaling. Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and has hunted in its national waters since. Norway and Iceland operate under objection or reservation to the moratorium. These three countries supply a niche market, structurally loss-making in Japan, where the state supports the industry.

Aboriginal subsistence whaling. Recognised by the Commission, it concerns in particular the Inuit of Greenland, Alaska and Canada, the Chukchi of Siberia and the inhabitants of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Quotas there are set on documented nutritional and cultural needs, and the logic is not commercial.

Bycatch. In several countries, animals that die in nets may be sold legally. Our page on bycatch shows the scale of the phenomenon.

Worth noting: in 2024 Japan authorised the sale of fin whale meat for the first time in half a century, and one distributor opened vending machine outlets to revive demand. These initiatives are looking for a market that no longer exists.

The health question

One argument is often overlooked, and it belongs to public health rather than to conservation.

Cetaceans are predators high in the trophic chain and they live a long time. They accumulate persistent organic pollutants, PCBs and organochlorine pesticides, in their blubber, and mercury in their muscles and organs. The older the animal and the higher it sits in the food chain, the higher the concentrations.

Analyses have regularly found, in cetacean products sold at retail, levels above the regulatory thresholds, in particular for odontocetes. This is one of the factors that has turned consumers away, at least as much as the ethical question.

This page is part of our file on whale products, which presents the six main uses that drove commercial whaling. See also the history of whaling and the statistics from 1900 to 2025.