By Ian Stuart
Whale protestor Pete Bethune has no regrets about spending time in a Japanese prison over his anti-whaling stance but says the big emotional hurdle was being separated from his family.
"The worst thing for me has been spending so much time away from my family," Mr Bethune said today when he arrived back in New Zealand.
Mr Bethune's estranged wife, Sharyn and their daughters, Danielle, 15, and Alycia, 13, met him at Auckland airport this morning following his deportation from Japan after spending four months in a Japanese prison cell as he awaited trial.
Earlier this week the Tokyo District Court sentenced him to two years' jail but suspended the sentence for five years.
He had pleaded guilty to obstructing commercial activities and charges stemming from climbing aboard the Japanese ship - trespass, vandalism and carrying a knife.
But he denied an assault charge, which prosecutors said left a 24-year-old whaler with chemical splash burns to his face following the February 11 confrontation in which Sea Shepherd activists hurled rancid butter stink bombs at the whaling ship.
Today Mr Bethune said his future with the American-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which ran the Southern Ocean protest, was uncertain. However, his abhorrence for Japanese whaling remained unchanged.
Before he was sentenced Sea Shepherd said there was no place in the future for Mr Bethune but later changed that stance, saying it was a tactical move in the hope of a lighter sentence.
"I have been in a black hole of information. I don't know that it helped me or not," he said today.
"The fear I have is that it becomes an advertisement in Japan for whale meat. There has been an enormous profile in Japan on it and I don't want to see that.
"Outside Japan it has helped enormously. There is a lot more Kiwis and Australians and Americans joining in the fray. It is a lot more global."
Mr Bethune said the emotional toll of his incarceration on his family had been huge, and he would have to work on his relationship.
"It is not easy being married to me, mate, it is more like being married without me," he said.
Arriving back in New Zealand on the 25th anniversary of the sinking by French saboteurs of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985 highlighted similarities between that and the sinking of the Ady Gil, his record-setting carbon-fibre and kevlar trimaran which he sold to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
The futuristic-looking boat sank after a January 6 collision with the Japanese whaling fleet's security ship the Shonan Maru II.
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior made Greenpeace a household name, Mr Bethune said.
"They were a group of hippies in sandals before that and they were able to leverage enormously off that. Perhaps Sea Shepherd can do a similar thing off what happened to the Ady Gil."
He said he decided to board the Shonan Maru a month after Ady Gil sank to make sure the Japanese people knew about how offensive whaling was to Australians and New Zealanders.
"In Japan there is so little recognition of this whaling and how it is deeply offensive.
"Japanese people don't realise that."
He knew he would be in trouble when he boarded the whaling ship but said after the sinking of the Ady Gil he thought the Japanese authorities "would be extremely lenient on me and boot me out under immigration laws. It did surprise me when I ended up spending four months there but it was a risk I took".
Mr Bethune did not know if he would go back to the Southern Ocean.
"I made a commitment in court that I wouldn't be going back but there are some other things that I can't tell you about."
NZPA