"How would you like it," an indignant American schoolgirl wrote to Prime Minister Tanaka, "if someone came up and started throwing harpoons at you?" This was one of 75,000 letters sent recently by children round the world protesting against Japan's slaughter of the whale, and dumped on Tanaka's doorstep in Tokyo.
Conservationists anxious to save the whale from extinction are now aiming their harpoons at the Japanese economy. Private wildlife organisations in America, including the prestigious National Audubon Society, have launched retaliatory boycotts of Japanese goods. The US State Department has threatened a ban on imports of Japanese fishery products.
Whether these tactics will bring Japan to her conservation senses should become clear at the International Whaling Commission meeting in London this week. Friends of the Earth, the London-based conservation group will be adding its voice to the protest by floating a 30ft plastic inflatable whale down the Thames to Vauxhall Bridge, near the site of the IWC talks tomorrow.
The betting in Japan, which is unanimously cast by world opinion as the bad guy, is that it will agree to accept some voluntary restrictions on whaling operations. But they will fiercely oppose the total ban on whaling which American is expected to propose, and a change in the whaling rules to block loopholes by which members have been able to flout restrictions.
The confrontation between America and Japan is likely to result in one of the stormiest meetings since the IWC was established after the war to safeguard the world's diminishing whale stocks. The Japanese along with the Soviet Union, the whale's other principal enemy, account for 85 per cent of the annual catch. Whereas the Russians use most of theirs as animal feed, the Japanese eat the whales they catch, and would like to go on doing so.
The Japanese contend that the finback, sperm and minke whales are nowhere near the point of extinction, and are even increasing. The conservationists retort that the Japanese can't count, and are reporting fictitious whale populations to justify the quota they want.
Western countries have felt a warm emotional attachment for the gentle and intelligent whale - especially since they gave up the mass slaughter of whales themselves. The Japanese, apart from a handful of Christian converts, did not know who or what Jonah was - until representatives of a whale protection society called Project Jonah came to these shores early this spring preaching the salvation of the whale.
Local people thought it odd that these cow-eaters should make so much fuss about the whale, but the whaling industry sensed disaster. It came out with a sharp attack on what it called, "interference with the traditional Japanese efforts to derive an important supply of protein." The public was alerted that the foreign barbarians were out to change Japanese eating habits and increase the nation's dependence on foreign beef imports. The whaling industry hinted darkly at links between the conservationists and American cattlemen.
Little of the 123,000 tons of whale meat eaten in Japan last year was wasted. The Japanese boil meat from the back with vegetables, the tail is eaten raw, and the chest roasted and tinned or processed into sausage. The testicles are considered a delicacy enhancing potency.
What really made the Japanese public sit up was the appearance of three blonde girls - one each from Canada, America and Sweden - on Prime Minister Tanaka's doorstep (he was absent) with the 75,000 letters containing appeals like "Save the whale" and "Be a whale's best friend."
The timing could not have been worse. With an election imminent, Tanaka is ready to be everybody's best friend except that of the whale, which doesn't have a vote. He is certainly not going to risk his own political skin for the sake of the whale, 50,000 people, it is claimed, depend on the whaling industry, and the ruling party has netted a good few yen in political contributions from the fishery companies.
The Prime Minister is in a dilemma. Japanese envoys to Washington have reported back that the Americans mean business with their economic sanctions. Yet if Japan bowed to international pressure and curtailed whaling operations, domestic reaction might well be electorally disastrous.
Angry newspaper editorials are minimising the ecological issue, and draw comparisons with the British who eat cute rabbits and the French who torture geese for their liver. For the ordinary person here, it is rather as it a bunch of foreigners had gone to tell the British to give up eating fish and chips.
