Japan to propose creating new organ of whaling nations+

TOKYO, Nov. 29 Kyodo - Japan will propose setting up an organization of whaling nations at a two-day meeting to be held in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, from Tuesday by 27 countries and a region that support whaling, sources familiar with the matter
said Monday.

But it is uncertain whether the proposal will be adopted at the meeting as
participants have yet to fully coordinate views on it, the sources added.
Japan plans to make the proposal against the backdrop of the rift in the
International Whaling Commission between pro- and anti-whaling members.
The annual IWC meeting in Morocco in June ended in a decision to defer until
next year a proposal presented by the IWC chairman and vice chairman that would
effectively allow Japan and some other countries to resume commercial whaling
under the commission's control.
Following the IWC assembly, Masahiko Yamada, the then Japanese minister of
agriculture, forestry and fisheries, said, ''To create a new organization is an
option.''
More than 30 high-ranking officials from the 27 countries in Europe, Africa,
the Asia-Pacific region and the Caribbean, including Norway, South Korea and
Russia, as well as Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, will attend
the meeting in the southwestern Japanese city of Shimonoseki, which has a
harbor for whaling ships.
Japan halted commercial whaling in 1986 in line with an international
moratorium on such activities, but it has hunted whales since 1987 for what it
calls scientific research purposes and is seeking to resume full-fledged
commercial whaling.
==Kyodo