This article posits the whaling debate in Japan as representing a conflict of environmental and human rights claims; specifically a struggle between animal preservation and cultural rights claims. The sustainable whaling that Japan advocates on human rights grounds is constructed by its critics as an abuse of the environment. Understanding the whaling debate as this form of conflict should help us to be more cognisant of the views of both sides and make us realise the difficulty in resolving the tensions within the whaling debate. I argue that, seen from this perspective, the Japanese do have a reasonable case in the whaling debate on the following grounds: conservation of whales is not really an issue; while Japanese claims to whale use as a "right" may be weak, the issue generally is politically fought between countries that historically have and have not used marine foods predominantly; Japan's sustainable approach to whaling under close International Whaling Commission (IWC) supervision might aid conservation better than if Japan was to leave IWC; and the case against whale use really relies on extreme NGO position that whales are comparable to humans and therefore should not be killed at all.