"The ship hasn't returned to Japan. So far there's no changes to our research whaling plans," Shigeki Takaya, an official in the whaling division of Japan's fisheries agency, told AFP.

"The Yushin Maru II made a port call in Indonesia to repair parts of the ship but it's not true that repairs could not be completed," he said.

Greenpeace said Friday the Yushin Maru II may be returning to Japan instead of heading back to the Antarctic to participate in Japan's annual whale hunt, which uses a loophole of the 1986 treaty banning commercial whaling.

A militant environmentalist group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said last week the vessel had been ordered to leave the Port of Surabaya in East Java without repairs.

Takaya declined to say what the problem was with the vessel, but he said the repairs were not linked to efforts by militant environmentalists to disrupt the hunt.

Sea Shepherd activists have trailed the Japanese whalers and attempted to impede their hunt, prompting the Japanese government-backed Institute of Cetacean Research to accuse them of "eco-terrorism".

Japan uses a loophole in an international moratorium on whaling that allows "lethal research" on whales. It makes no secret of the fact that the meat ends up on dinner tables and says whaling is a cultural tradition.

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