Sixty percent of Japanese support whale hunt

A handout picture taken by Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) in 2013 shows a Bryde's whale on the deck of a Japanese whaling ship

Tokyo (AFP) - Sixty percent of Japanese people support the country's whaling programme, but only 14 percent eat whale meat, a new poll showed Tuesday.

The survey comes less than a month after the United Nations' top court ruled the annual mission to the Southern Ocean by Japanese whaling vessels was a commercial hunt masquerading as science in a bid to skirt an international ban.