Yahoo! Japan Selling Toxic Whale Meat Online: Standing up against the online sale of whale and dolphin body parts

Online Whale Meat

The items for sale include red meat, intestines, kidneys, bacon, heart, testicles, tongue, and other internal organs derived from Bryde’s, minke, sei and fin whales, as well as the smaller, toothed cetaceans including pilot whale, Baird’s beaked whale, Risso’s dolphin and false killer whale, and many items with no clear species named. In addition to cetaceans caught domestically by Japanese hunters, Yahoo! Japan offers whale products imported from Norway and Iceland, traded under reservations exempting them from the ban on international trade in whales under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The online research also revealed 58 whale pet products and treats, including “additive-free” whale heart and whale liver.

Yahoo! Japan is likely the largest online retailer of such products in Japan as most leading supermarkets and online retailers, including Amazon Japan and Rakuten, no longer sell cetacean products.

Toxic Delicacies

EIA investigated the pollution levels in 66 cetacean products that it purchased from Yahoo! Japan. These were analysed in accredited laboratories in Japan between 2007-2025 and almost one-quarter contained mercury concentrations at a level at least 10 times higher than advisory levels set by the Government of Japan. The average mercury concentration in the 66 samples was 2.67 parts per million (ppm), almost seven times higher than the 0.4ppm advisory limit.

Japan versus the whales

Japan’s insistence on killing whales for profit is almost legendary. It is a battle that it fought within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for decades, whilst consistently defying the IWC-maintained global ban on commercial whaling (the “moratorium”), which has been in place since 1986. In fact, between 1986 and 2024, Japan killed more than 24,000 great whales and more than 489,000 smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises (which are not directly protected by the moratorium).

For much of this time, Japan claimed that its whale hunting was for science; citing a legal provision in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (which established the IWC) as allowing an IWC member country to issue “special permits” for research purposes. The UN’s International Court of Justice ruled in 2014 that Japan’s whaling was not for genuine “scientific research purposes“.

In 2018, after Japan’s most recent proposal to overturn the moratorium on commercial whaling was robustly rejected at the 68th IWC meeting, it left the IWC. It then resumed its commercial takes in the North Pacific in July 2019. This is despite the nation’s legal duty to co-operate with the IWC, mandated by customary international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

A catch quota of 317 minke, sei and Bryde’s whales was set for 2024 and, in a shocking move, the Government of Japan also approved an expansion of the hunt to catch 59 fin whales, which are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as ‘Vulnerable’.  The IWC has no agreed population estimate for North Pacific fin whales and there are grave concerns that this new hunt threatens this poorly known population.

Meanwhile, the world’s cetaceans are under threat as never before, with their marine environment increasingly degraded through climate change, chemical, plastic and noise pollution, commercial fishing and other human activities. The IWC has a number of important work steams trying to address these threats. Efforts that Japan largely opposed whilst it was an IWC member and which it continues to not cooperate with.

More details of the trade, the companies involved and associated issues can be found in the report here.