Live Blogging The FCCJ Press Conference Morishita Joji, Japan's Delegate To The IWCF

14:30 Nobody's home. Or almost nobody.

There is a reason, of course. The Foreign Press Center two days ago hosted a Morishita press conference. A lot of the foreign press went to that press conference. Today only 35% of the seats in this small room are occupied.

This is the second embarrassingly under-attended press conference I have been to this week. Wednesday's press conference of Eda Kenji on Wednesday, the urbane and erudite co-leader of the Japan Innovation Party, one of the only two significant non-Communist opposition parties, had rows of empty chairs in the working press -- despite our being in the midst of a crucial and increasingly combatative House of Representatives election campaign.

Then again, Morishita answers a length with a lot of victimization complaints, which can be a tremendous turn off.

He did answer my question on the scientific bases of the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) and a Minke harvest when the Minke are under pressure from larger Fin and Humpback. Seems to me that taking only animals from a population under pressure gives one a very skewed sense of the ecosystem's functioning.

Morishita is far more convincing, more accessible and more personable when he is discussing the possible scientific results from animal sampling. He should stay on arguing the science, exclusively. The "Us vs. Them" narrative simply irritates.

Later - Two observations

a) Morishita-san in his answers makes an unusual assumption: that their are folks who are interested in hearing how oppressive it is to not be liked.

b) that the under-attendance at both the Eda Kenji event and the Morishita event have a same cause: the sch Foreign Press Center's scheduling and promoting the first Morishita press conference two days earlier at the basically the same time as the FCCJ's Eda press conference.