Joji Morishita

Career

• Director-General, Japan’s National Research Institute of Far Seas Fisheries, 2013 – 2016
• Counsellor, Fisheries Agency, Government of Japan, 2008 – 2013
• Senior Negotiator, Fisheries Agency, Government of Japan, 2005 – 2008
• First Secretary, Embassy of Japan in Washington, DC, 1993 – 1996
• Involved in international negotiations regarding oceans and fisheries since 1982 as a representative of the Government of Japan
• Japan’s Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), 2013 – 2018, served as IWC’s Chair from 2016 to 2018
• Served as Chair of the Scientific Committee of the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), 2015 – 2019
• Japan’s Commissioner to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), 2016 - present
• Also covered such areas as the Convention on Biological Diversity, CITES, and UN General Assembly Informal Consultations on the sustainable fisheries resolution, the Meeting on High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean, Rio plus 20 and other international ocean and environmental meetings

Education

PhD (Agriculture), Kyoto University, Master of Public Policy (MPP), Harvard University. BS, Kyoto University.

Publications

• Why Whales Strand? Tragedy of Anti-Whaling Movement (In Japanese), Kawadesyobo Shinsya, 2002
• What is the ecosystem approach (Marine Policy 32 (2008) 19-26)
• The IWC moratorium on commercial whaling was not a value judgment and was not intended as a permanent prohibition (Aegean Review of the Law of the Sea and Maritime Law 2011)
• The truth about the commercial whaling moratorium, Senri Ethnological Studies, 83, 337-353（2013）
• Whaling in the Antarctic – Significance and Implications of the ICJ Judgement, BRILL NIJHOFF, 238-267 (2015）
• Withdrawal from the IWC and International Negotiations (in Japanese), Seizando-shoten (2019)