My ancestors used to ride on horseback into foreign villages and burn the fucker flat, and believe me, I feel the urge to continue the work of my proud forefathers. But we no longer ride wooden boats over vast uncharted seas into the maw of the tempest and return as men with our dead lashed to the mast. Heritage is something to be understood as tasks of necessity which also doubled as rites of passage. It is well understood that the Aztecs no longer need to throw a virgin into a volcano to ensure a bountiful harvest, nor is it practical or even legal to burn a woman at the stake for heresy. So, any eskimo who stands on the shadows of his long dead elders and demands the right to kill a whale needs to shut the fuck up and go live in an igloo for the other 364 days a year, stand far removed from the conveniences and entrapments of modern society such as medicine and electricity and the internal combustion engine, then I'll consider his "right" to oar his way out into the Bering Straight and harpoon a fuckin whale.
There is a reasonable realm of pursuit of heritage. If the people of the South Pacific would like to tattoo themselves in the traditional method, great. If African villagers want to test their manhood by flailing each other with canes, have a blast. If a thousand Egyptians want to build a pyramid, cool. But when you have species of animal and plant that are endangered to the point of extinction and some little piss-ant bunch of black-tooth goobers wants to take a certain percent for themselves as a "right" because their culture did it hundreds of years ago, fuck them.
Heres why: When you have a group of maybe, say, a thousand Inuit Indians (whichever eskimo group, sue me for ignorance) and you weigh those thousand douchebags against 6 billion people, who are the worlds living population, they don't get to claim precedence over the needs of the current and future generations. Science benefits from the continued existence of those animals. When you eradicate an animal into extinction, it's gone forever, and I'm not willing to allow a species to be hunted into extinction so Tok-Glok can have a legitimate reason to wear a bone in his nose.
And as far as Japanese having a penchant for whale meat, fuck them, too. I like chicken, but if there was only five chickens left on earth, I think I would probably try to restrain myself. Theres other things to eat, and as much as I like Japanese culture, those fuckers have weird tastes in food. Japanese society has an odd habit of being very group-oriented (the culture is bigger than the self, etc.), whale probably tastes like shit and none of 'em will admit it. Eat a burger, Tojo.