Hundreds have been injured and thousands more are missing and feared dead in cities all across Japan after an attack by enormous humaning landships driven by whales ploughed across the heavily populated northern Pacific Rim country this weekend.

"I was just doing my thing, walking along the street, singing a song to my wife when all of a sudden this gigantic thing that looks like a coral reef on wheels burst through the building beside us," a dazed Ryuji Takayama, 23, told reporters. "Then Reiko was skewered by this big harpoon and dragged her up into the thing. I don't remember what happened after that".

Mr Takayama's girlfriend Reiko Asakawa, 22, has been missing since the attack.

Stories of giant vehicles resembling coral reefs with wheels, apparently controlled by whales and harpooning people and pulling them inside have been reported all across Japan today. Analysts are worried that whales may be returning to their humaning activities, thought to have ended for good in the mid-80s.

Whales had formerly hunted humans for their body fat, used to produce various products such as pheromones for sexually enticing other whales and heating lamps for the icy ocean depths. These lamps have now been replaced by more efficient technologies. Human teeth were once used by female whales to decorate their bodies.

Huge humaning fleets used to roam the Earth's landmasses, hunting human prey. The practice began to receive wide condemnation among the whales in the 1960s as whale scientists and environmentalists began to assert that humans showed slight signs of intelligence. The claims that humans had complex social structures and were even perhaps capable of creative communication and abstract thought were clear signs of an underdeveloped yet dawning intelligence, they said. Harvesting humans for luxury items and trinkets, they concluded, posed great ethical dilemmas.

Although the claims of human intelligence are still widely disputed, the practice of humaning was banned in 1986 and aside from sporadic reports of illegal human poaching, it had completely subsided until this weekend's attack on Japan.

No one is exactly sure why the whales have resumed humaning. Some scientists and government officials believe that whales may wish to control human overpopulation. Others cite growing rates of obesity, especially in North America and Western Europe, setting populations at risk for resumption of demand for human fat, or blubber as it is also known.

Still others believe that the whales have been observing us for the last 20 years and have concluded that we are not, in fact, all that intelligent and that harvesting our bodies for luxury items or trinkets provokes no ethical quandary.

However the most likely reason for the attacks is one of retaliation against or warning to countries who support the practice of whaling, harvesting the bodies of whales for luxury items or trinkets. These countries are stepping up their efforts to overturn a ban on whaling that has been in effect since 1986 at a conference of the International Whaling Commission in St. Kitts this week. This theory seems born out by the deadly attack on Japan and by reports of massive out-of-season whale movements off the coasts of Norway, Iceland, and various Caribbean and African countries.

Greenpeace