Despite orders from global regulators to provide more evidence that Japan’s expeditions in Antarctica have a scientific purpose, Japans’ chief whaling negotiator said on Monday that the country will resume its hunts in the Antarctic this year.

Joji Morishita, Japan's commissioner to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), told journalists on Monday that the whole debate about whether or not Japan should be killing whales has moved away from science and has entered politics.

According to Agence France Presse, the scientific committee of the IWC said on 19 June that Japan had failed to put forward the relevant details explaining why it wanted to kill almost 4,000 minke whales in the Antarctic over the next 12 years.

The Guardian reported that Japan’s revised proposal for whale hunts targets 333 minke whales every year between 2015 and 2027, which is almost one-third of what it has previously set as target.

The IWC on its website noted that the media attention to the issue of special permit whaling and Japan’s proposal for a new special permit programme in the Southern Ocean known as the NEWREP-A.

It has been said that an expert panel has already had a meeting to assess Japan's proposal in February. Reports by the panel and Japans’ response were to be examined by the Scientific Committee at its meeting in San Diego.

The report said, “It was not possible for the Scientific Committee to reach a consensus view of overall programme. Some scientists believed that additional information provided by Japan was sufficient to allow the programme to go ahead as planned and others did not”.

Morishita told reporters that there is no definite conclusion in the report, which is not so surprising in the IWC because it is very well known that the IWC is a divided organization.

Because of this division, even the scientific committee is always having difficulty in coming up with some kind of a conclusion.