""We see one or two whales washing ashore a year, but this may be the first time to find over 100 of them on a beach," a coastguard official told AFP.
The pod was stretched out along a roughly six-mile-long stretch of beach in Hokota, Ibaraki, where they had been found by locals early Friday morning.
"They are alive. I feel sorry for them," a man told public broadcaster NHK, as others were seen ferrying buckets of seawater to the stranded animals and pouring it over them.
Several animals could be seen writhing in a futile effort to move themselves on the sand, although as the morning progressed they were clearly becoming weaker
Melon-headed whales, also known as electra dolphins, are relatively common in Japanese waters and can grow to be six- to nine-feet long.
In 2011, about 50 melon-headed whales beached themselves in a similar area.
Despite international opprobrium, Japan hunts minke and pilot whales off its own coast, and has for many years also pursued the mammals in the Antarctic Ocean using a scientific exemption to the international moratorium on whaling.
It has never made any secret of the fact that meat from the animals is also consumed.
However, a UN court ruled last year that its hunt was a commercial activity masquerading as research, and ordered it be halted.
Tokyo, which insists whaling is a tradition and labels environmental campaigners as "cultural imperialists", has vowed to restart a redesigned southern ocean whaling programme, possibly later this year.""
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