Another boat washed up in December. This one, discovered by police on Sado Island, Japan, was broken in two. Inside, police soon discovered its terrible cargo: five peoplecorpsesand a pair of human heads. There was little to identify the partially skeletonized victims. For a couple of days, this dreadful mystery, and the quiet island of cedar trees and endangered birds that hosted it, became the talk of the world.
What the police found on Sado, an island 30 kilometers west of mainland Japan, was alarming. More horrifying, though, is that this gruesome wreck was not unique. In 2018 alone, more than 200 vessels were found adrift or on beaches across Japan’s expansive western flank.
These are the ghost ships.
They are the result of desperate fishermen venturing far from shore without support or supplies.
Some of the ghost ships are found like the one on Sadoempty save for their dead and decomposing crews. Others are found eerily deserted in the sand, their crews lost to the depths before they reach Japanese shores. Whatever their fate, the crews of these ghost ships have something in common. As the splattered script on the side of the Sado Island wreck shows, these boats came from across the sea to the westfrom North Korea.
Excluded from their own fishing grounds and starved by foreign sanctions, North Korean fishermen have started venturing ever farther into the Korean East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan. They do this even in bad weather, and even in vessels sometimes shorter than city buses. The result is hundreds of ghost ships, dozens of corpses, and many more missing bodies. These ghost ships are, however, only the most visible sign of a much larger problem.
To really understand the deaths of the men who washed up on Sado, you first have to understand the decades of failure that pushed them there, and the contemporary pressures on North Koreans to net fisheven if they risk dying along the way.
For centuries, long before the United States and the Soviet Union sliced the Korean Peninsula in two at the end of the Second World War, Koreans were suspicious of the sea.
A few decades later, the newly minted Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under Kim Il-sung was keen to develop its fishing capabilities, and smashing those old myths was a great place to start. The regime, says Robert Winstanley-Chesters, an expert on North Korean fishing at the University of Leeds in England, was intent on developing beyond any sort of superstition. Yet as late as 1960, Winstanley-Chesters wrote in his book Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours, North Korean officials grumbled about the need to eradicate mysticism in their seafaring comrades.
By the 1960s, North Korean fishermen were being corralled into one of the country’s ambitious Six Goals of industrial developmentpartly focused on fisheries, but encompassing everything from steel production to fabric manufacturing. Indeed, Kim’s desire to develop North Korea’s fishing capacity still reverberates today:
Let this socialist country resound with Song of Big Fish Haul and be permeated with the fragrant smell of fish and other seafoods! declared one recent government slogan.
By 1957, it was hoped that catches would soon reach up to 600,000 tonnes a year. Despite Soviet help, North Korea’s fishing successes never matched Kim Il-sung’s heady ideal. Bureaucratic incompetence, shambolic infrastructure, and woeful scientific research meant that, even by the 1970s, North Korean officials hardly knew what sorts of fish lived in the Korean East Sea. Not that they could have caught much anyway. By the end of the decade, North Korean trawlers rarely weighed more than 1,000 tonnes, while their South Korean neighbors were busy launching ships 10 times bigger.
For North Korean fishermen, desperation and coercion dovetail with another drive: cash. Nicholas Ahlmark, who in 2019 produced a documentary about North Korean ghost ships, says that, increasingly, North Korean skippers are independent operatorsthey get their fishing permits from the state, but are otherwise working for themselves. For those few who excel, offshore fishing can be lucrative work.
The North Korean regime doesn’t seem to care where this new breed of independent fishermen casts its nets. The government has apparently done nothing to stop them from trying their luck fishing illegally in foreign watersa policy (or lack thereof) that leads some North Koreans to disaster.
However you explain the ghost ships, Winstanley-Chesters is in no doubt about what they represent: they are a stark symbol of the DPRK’s maritime failures. More to the point, they suggest that contemporary North Korea is desperate for food resources, and desperate enough to put coastal communities at real risk, [and] break all the rules to poach fishing stocks.
Nor is there much optimism for the future. If Chinese boats are operating in North Korean coastal waters, then that will continue to push North Korean ships further out, says James Brown, a political scientist at Temple University, Japan Campus.
Part of the Tula Foundation and Hakai Institute family.