A senior Japanese official said Tokyo still hoped to wrest control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) this week despite narrowly losing the first three votes at the bitterly divided body's annual meeting.

"I am hoping that we will win at least one or more votes at this IWC," said Akira Nakamae, deputy director general of the Fisheries Agency of Japan, in an interview with AFP.

Nakamae said that by winning a vote for the pro-whaling side, Japan would establish that its argument for a return to "sustainable" commercial whale-hunts had been accepted -- a position rejected by anti-whaling nations.

"The attempt by Japan to turn the whaling commission back into a whaling club shows just how out of touch they are with world opinion," said Ian Campbell, environment minister of Australia, a fierce opponent of whaling.

Japan has complained that pro-whaling states have deadlocked the commission, set up in 1946 to stop whales passing into extinction through over hunting.

"There is no exit from this kind of statemate," said Nakamae.

But Campbell was unapologetic: "Australia and New Zealand and Brazil and Argentina and the US and a group of like-minded countries have worked very hard to make sure the whale slaughtering nations don't get a majority."

"People who save whales are happy for it to be deadlocked."

Among votes which could arise on Sunday, was a bid by Japan to censure Greenpeace over a collision between one of the group's boats and a Japanese whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean in January.

Having a majority on the 70-nation IWC would allow Tokyo to control the agenda for the first time since a moratorium was introduced 20 years ago, and environmentalists fear, let Tokyo frustrate conservation efforts.

Defying their own dire predictions, anti-whaling states have so far been able to convince wavering nations to reject successive Japanese proposals -- in the latest vote Saturday, prevailing by only one vote.

"The whales are doing well at the IWC, but not so well in the sea," Patrick Ramage, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (NGO) told AFP.

He was referring to the "scientific" whaling carried out by Japan and Iceland, allowed by the IWC through what critics say is a "loophole" in its charter. One Japanese whale hunt is even at sea as the IWC takes place.

Norway rejects the moratorium on commercial whaling entirely. Around 2,000 whales a year are taken by the three nations.

The moratorium is in no immediate danger as it needs a 75 percent majority to be overturned.

In a fiery day at the IWC on Saturday, anti-whaling nations inflicted a third straight voting defeat on Japan -- the latest on Tokyo's request for coastal whalers to resume a small for-profit inshore Minke whale hunt.

It would have only been an academic victory for Japan since the cull would have been barred anyway under the moratorium but it would have been a symbolic step forward for Tokyo, which has worked for years to turn the tide in the IWC.

Australia meanwhile Saturday ignited a new row with Tokyo, branding Japan's whale hunters "inhumane" and "disgusting" while environmentalists, who entered the five-day talks fearing a Japanese power grab, were buoyant.

Campbell brandished a new IFAW report which he said disproved Japan's argument that its "scientific" whale hunts, allowed by the IWC, were humane.

"It is a horrendous thing ... it is wrong and it has to stop."

Japan's IWC alternate commissioner Joji Morishita hit back that Japan's whale killing was "the most humane way, it is proved by science."

"I just wonder if the minister knows how long it will take for kangaroos to die in his country?" referring to attempts to control the marsupials seen as pests in parts of Australia. Japan earlier unveiled a plan to shift the IWC back to managing whales stocks for hunting.

"Whales should be treated as any other marine living resource available for harvesting subject to conservation and science based management," said a Japanese briefing document on the plan known as "normalisation."

Tokyo also proposed a meeting outside the IWC, before next year's talks in Alaska, to discuss how to turn the body away from pure conservation.

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