On Monday, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a parliamentary committee that he would like to step up efforts to resume commercial whaling.

"I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research in order to obtain scientific data indispensable for the management of whale resources," Abe told the committee, according to the Guardian.

A March ruling by the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) halted Japan's whaling activities in the waters around Antarctica. The ICJ ruled that Japan's scientific whaling program in the region—which took whales in order to gather data and then sold the meat to markets in Japan—wasn't scientific at all and could be considered a commercial operation. (See "Japan Halts