A POLL by Japanese video-sharing website Nico Nico Douga following last week's Antarctic confrontation showed 67 per cent of respondents believed Japan needed to promote itself better "as a whaling country" and only 9.1 per cent thought that hunting should now stop.
This is disheartening for those, such as Greenpeace Japan, who are trying to run a hearts-and-minds campaign against whaling, targeting a demographic beachhead of teenagers and young adults.
Those are the Japanese that opinion polls consistently show are least supportive of whaling in Southern Ocean and northern Pacific waters and most open to the idea of stopping scientific whaling altogether.
But almost 84 per cent of 92,430 respondents to Nico Nico Douga -- a website with more registered users and a far cooler image in Japan than YouTube -- called Sea Shepherd's tactics unacceptable and a mere 5.5 per cent supported them.
Results of the poll came as Sea Shepherd yesterday threatened to board the Japanese whaling vessel Shonan Maru 2 and arrest its crew if the Australian and New Zealand governments failed to lay criminal charges against the whalers.
"If Australia and New Zealand do not bring charges against the Shonan Maru, they leave us little choice but to go and arrest the vessel," said Sea Shepherd Conservation Group leader Paul Watson. "We will attempt a citizen's arrest on it and that will be a confrontation and whatever the consequences of that confrontation will be the fault of the Australian government for failure to act.
"There (are) 22 Australian citizens down here, 11 New Zealanders and there is no protection of the citizens from their respective governments."
Australian National University professor of international law Donald Rothwell said the only implication of a citizen's arrest would be headlines for Sea Shepherd.
"It's completely nonsense, it has no basis on the international law or domestic law and any attempt to commit such an act in the name of Australia just doesn't have any grounds at all under Australian law in the Southern Ocean," Professor Rothwell said.
He said there was scope for prosecutions against the Japanese crew to be brought by the Australian or NZ governments if they believed there was sufficient evidence. But he said it was not appropriate for either government to arrest crew immediately.