In March, the internet news site Videonews.com posted a conversation between environmental journalist Tetsuji Ida and Waseda University researcher Yasuhiro Sanada, who writes about fisheries. During the talk, Sanada said that whaling is a "dead industry," and seemed to think that the ongoing controversy over Japan's official research whaling policy is a red herring. The Nippon Research Center says that 95 percent of Japanese people consume whale very rarely or never at all. Whaling only employs about 1,000 people. And regardless of the questionable morality of Japan's research whaling program, it only kills several hundred whales a year, which doesn't have much of an impact, environmentally or otherwise.