Japan's "vote consolidation operation" in the International Whaling Commission

This report updates and expands the Third Millennium Foundation’s (3MF) 2002 “Briefing on Japan’s ‘Vote-Buying’ strategy in the International Whaling Commission (IWC)”, which looked at Japan’s use of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to obtain the support of aid-recipient countries in the IWC. In doing so it reviews the origins and development of the current Japanese campaign, launched in the late 1990s, explicitly to recruit enough new member countries into the IWC to obtain a majority in support of Japan’s whaling agenda.