Japan said Thursday it was cancelling its annual Antarctic whaling hunt for the first time in more than a quarter of a century after a UN court ruled that the program was a commercial activity disguised as science.

A "deeply disappointed" Tokyo earlier this week said it would honor Monday's judgment by the United Nations' Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) but did not exclude the possibility of future whaling programs.

On Thursday, officials said the next Antarctic hunt, which would have started in late 2014, had been scrapped, just weeks after the most recent one finished.

"We have decided to cancel research whaling [in the Antarctic] for the fiscal year starting in April because of the recent ruling," a fisheries agency official told AFP.

But he added that "we plan to go ahead with research whaling in other areas," including the northern Pacific. Japan also has a coastal whaling program that is not covered by a commercial whaling ban.

Australia, backed by New Zealand, hauled Japan before the ICJ in 2010 in a bid to end the annual Southern Ocean hunt.

Tokyo has used a legal loophole in the 1986 whaling ban that allowed it to continue slaughtering the mammals, ostensibly so it could gather scientific data.

However, it has never made a secret of the fact that the whale meat from these hunts often ends up on dining tables.

"I think everyone knew all along that research was a fig leaf to disguise commercial whaling," said Jeffrey Kingston, an Asian studies professor at Temple University in Tokyo.

"But the Japanese government erred in thinking that this loophole ... provided a legal basis for continued whaling as long as it asserted that it was for research. It did not anticipate that the research argument would be exposed as a sham," Kingston said.

AFP