Japanese boat owners charged with helping smuggle shark fins
Source: Associated Press
Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, Associated Press
Updated 9:06 pm CST, Friday, December 14, 2018
HONOLULU (AP) — U.S. prosecutors in Hawaii are accusing the owners and officers of a Japanese fishing boat of helping Indonesian fishermen smuggle nearly 1,000 shark fins, worth about $58,000 on the black market.
It's against U.S. law to remove the fins of sharks at sea. Prosecutors say the fishermen harvested fins from sharks that were still alive, then discarded their carcasses into the ocean. Fins are a pricey delicacy often used in soups.
The boat's owner, Japanese business Hamada Suisan Co. Ltd., and JF Zengyoren, a Japanese fishing cooperative that the vessel belongs to, were charged with aiding and abetting the trafficking and smuggling of 962 shark fins, the U.S. attorney's office in Hawaii said. The boat's captain, fishing master and first engineer were also charged.
. . .
Last month, 10 Indonesian fishermen who were working on the longline tuna-fishing vessel were arrested in Hawaii and charged with trying to smuggle nearly 1,000 shark fins from the U.S. to Indonesia.
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Japanese-boat-owners-charged-with-helping-smuggle-13467068.php
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Take away the Japanese? I think education is the key. The government of Japan must do a better job of educating their people about the foolishness of depleting the world's shark population just so rich Japanese assholes can have cartilage soup. There's no flavor in cartilage, so just mix the spices with something equally inedible and let them dine on that. Japanese culture is extremely resistant to change in some cases. The same goes with whale blubber. The Japanese government actually subsidizes whalers to keep whale blubber on the Japanese diet. Problem is, the Japanese people have lost their taste for whale blubber, so they have government freezers full of the stuff. But they still subsidize the whalers so they don't lose their jobs. 
Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
