By Erik Derr (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Apr 07, 2013 05:53 PM EDT

Japan's annual whaling mission in the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, hauled in a "record low" 103 minke whales, a government minister said --- the result of "unforgivable sabotage."

Yoshimasa Hayashi, the island nation's agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister, said the hunt tallied less than half of what was caught in 2012, less than half its tally last year and didn't include any fin whales.

The bounty was Japan's smallest, Hayashi said, since the "research whaling" trips started in 1987.

The annual whale hunt has long been criticized by environmental activists and foreign governments as a loophole to get around an international moratorium on commercial whale hunting passed in 1986.

Tokyo defends the practice by explaining captured whales are studied by Japan's whaling research institute --- in an effort to prove their populations can sustain commercial whaling --- and then sold for food.

Norway and Iceland are reportedly the only nations that hunt whales in open defiance of the international commercial whaling ban.

Japan's whaling fleet, which is currently headed back home, left port in December, hoping to catch about 1,000 whales.

But, during the 48-day-long expedition, members of the militant environmentalist group Sea Shepherd - labeled "pirates" earlier this year by a judge in the United States - disrupted the hunt four times, the fisheries agency said.

The Japanese ships spent 21 days --- a little less than half of the entire time of the trip --- avoiding activist vessels,

Sea Shepherd committed "unforgivable sabotage," Hayashiwas quoted saying by Kyodo News, that included colliding with a whaling vessel as it refueled.

"We will seek more support from other countries to conduct research whaling in a stable manner," the minister said.

Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson is an international fugitive who has relentlessly pursued the whaling fleet and doesn't hide the fact the campaign employs highly confrontational tactics.

Sea Shepherd's ships, the Steve Irwin, Bob Barker and Sam Simon, returned to port this year with an estimated $1.03 million in damage, from confrontations with Japanese whalers.

Even though eating whale is part of Japan's culinary tradition, the reported decline in the nation's consumption of the meat over the last decade has left the economic viability of the whaling industry in doubt.

A recent report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare estimated the whaling program costs Japanese taxpayers $10 million a year.

Regardless, Hayashi said in an interview earlier this year that the hunt would continue, dismissing anti-whaling voices as "a cultural attack, a kind of prejudice against Japanese culture".

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