Five small ships sailed out of harbor on Monday in Japan’s first commercial whale hunt in more than three decades, a move that has aroused global condemnation and fears for the fate of whales. Japan has long said few whale species are endangered, and news in December that it was leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to resume hunting was the culmination of years of campaigns by industry supporters and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose constituency includes a city that has long whaled. “If we had more whale available, we’d eat it more,” said Sachiko Sakai, a 66-year-old taxi driver in Kushiro, a gritty port city on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, where the whaling ships were waved out of harbor in a brief ceremony.
