Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours

Front matter

Robert Winstanley-Chesters

Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours

Vibrant Matter(s)

Contents

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Chapter 1 A Watery Introductions gaiei

Abstract The book’s introductory chapter outlines its ambitions, aims and objectives. Fish, fishing and fishing communities are perhaps among the most opaque and little-studied developmental ecosystems. Equally, North Korea is one of the most difficult to study and confusing research sites on the globe. In introducing this book, its shape and objectives, this chapter aims to give a coherent and comprehensive sense of how this opacity and difficulty might be overcome and managed. In particular, the chapter engages with the literature of vibrant, lively and non-human matters, as this is the lens through which the author seeks to explore the realm of fish, fisherpeople and fishing. Following the work of scholars such as Jane Bennett and Sarah Whatmore, the interactions and exchanges that mark out such a complex ‘web of life’ will be explored in a wide variety of scales, sites and situations. Vibrancy and liveliness of such fishing matter(s) will be considered in the context of both abundance and scarcity, vitality and degradation within this book and an introduction sensitive to thoughts and theories, which might bind these varied situations together is important to that consideration. Vital to this watery introduction to will be a sense of the nature of the web of life within which these vibrant matters function, especially in the political and politico-social sense of that web, focusing as it does on North Korea, a national polity possessed of its own peculiar, distinct and local form of politics. While Jason Moore, who coined the notion of the ‘web of life’ used within this book, sought to unpack the place and role of nature within a web of capitalist life, of course, North Korea is anything but a conventional space of capitalism. This book roots its analysis of Pyongyang’s ideology within that produced by Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung, which holds it to be characterised by a theatric or charismatic politics recognisable to both Max Weber and Clifford Geertz. Finally, this introduction engages with the methodologies and literature of fishing histories and geographies across the globe. The watery terrains of this book, therefore, from North Korea and its neighbours are complex assemblages of the symbolic, constructed and co-produced as well as the concrete and the vibrant.

Keywords North Korea - Geographic literature - Fishing - Heonik kwon and Byung-ho chung - Vibrant matters

© The Author(s) 2020 1 R. Winstanley-Chesters, Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-98 1-15-0042-8_1

‘By emulating the working spirit of the People’s Army which made a new history of ‘sea of gold,’ the fishing sector should drastically bolster up the fishing industry and land a huge haul, thus supplying a large amount of fish to enrich the people’s diet.”!

Kim Jong Un’s New Year Address of 2015 was not the first time a North Korean leader had focused on maritime resources and products of the sea within a key statement of national intent, but it is certainly a moment in which fish are front and centre of North Korea’s political narrative. The wider world, however, seemed not to notice. Most readers of this book will know North Korean political narratives for different material reasons. In fact, North Korea would have most readers know its political narratives for different material reasons. For many years, North Korean materials which the world has known and which the world has been globally concerned about, have been its military, fissile and nuclear. Global news media (and the South Korean government) have been woken early in the morning by sights of North Korea’s latest ICBM heading skywards as dawn breaks, Kim Jong Un watching with glee, cigarette in hand.” At other moments North Korea has shown off the material of conventional and nuclear war as it passes through Kim Il Sung Square in endless procession.” The world has also been transfixed as the concrete of the Yongbyon Nuclear Reactor has crunched back to earth in a burst of noise and dust as it was sacrificed for diplomatic necessity.’ At still other times, the world has been transfixed in the misery, pain and degradation of the North Korean public as they scrabbled grass from the ground and bark from the trees to offset starvation and famine” or read of the moments and material of incarceration, torture and capture in weaponised works of literature and advocacy designed to delegitimise Pyongyang as an authentic governmental power.°

The materials which this book is concerned with have been seldom considered, seldom seen in writing and analysis of North Korea. This book considers fish, fishing infrastructure and communities focused on their extraction in North Korea. As much as fish and fishing in North Korea have generally been ignored by history and academic writing, they have long been important to Pyongyang’s political and developmental agenda. They have also long been important to Pyongyang’s geopolitical and diplomatic ambitions; fish, fishing resources and capabilities were elements in interactions between North Korea and the Soviet Union, for instance, as far back as the 1960s. North Korean fishing endeavours were conversely important to discourage in the minds of various Pacific fisheries commissions and organisations. Fish and fishing have also long been important to families, local political units and communities in North Korea. In recent times, this importance has only

'New Years Address (2015).

North Korea Confirms Successful New Ballistic Missile Test (2019).

5Starving North Koreans Forced to Survive on Diet of Grass and Tree Bark (2019). Harden (2013).

increased during times of economic decline and food shortages, fish have become useful as stores of value which little or no input from the state or bureaucratic institutions. Extraordinarily this has led to the phenomena of ‘ghost ships’ in which developmental communities not expert in fishing matters have been pressured to go to sea with disastrous results as fishing boats and their crews have washed up on the beaches of Hokkaido and elsewhere, dead.’

North Korea may be part of a peninsula, but it is not an island. Its politics has never been disconnected from wider challenges facing the world and this book examines fish, fishing and fishing infrastructures in that nation in the context of both global climate change and environmental crisis. That the world’s oceans are ecologically dying is a cliched truism which unfortunately is oft-repeated in global and political and media narratives, but which is for the most part entirely true. Acidification of the waters of the world caused by increasing levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is but the latest challenge to befall the creatures of those waters. While acidification so far appears to have a disproportionate long-term impact on species requiring calcified shells and exoskeletons, such as corals, rising water temperatures and rapidly shifting gyres and currents bringing temporary hot spikes could wipe out such animals in the short term.” Rising sea temperatures are evidenced as having begun to shift fish populations and their migration routes across the globe so that fish species appear in parts of the ocean they have never been seen in before.'° Spider crabs and other predatory crustaceans have also, due to these changing temperatures, begun to colonise new territories across the world, depleting and devastating maritime species who have not through evolution developed a defence or response to them.'! Global TV audiences have similarly been horrified and transfixed by programmes such as Blue Planet II, which not only recounted some of this but also considered the sheer catastrophe of plastic and other non-biodegradable pollutants in our oceans.'? Awareness of seascapes subject to extreme degradation such as the space known as Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic and other material in suspension in the water column have accumulated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean through the actions of the North Pacific Gyre, has been growing and impacting on both fish populations and fishery communities.'* North Korean fishers would be subject to the denudation of the seas as a result of all of this; the commons which provides such a free opportunity for the institutionally and infrastructurally challenged nation is much reduced and diminished having a huge impact on any potential catch.

McCurry (2015).

SOrr et al. (2005).

°Walther et al. (2002). '0Hoegh-Guldberg et al. (2007).

"'Thatje et al. (2005).

Calderwood (2018).

As huge as these external environmental factors have been and will be on the seas of the globe their current impacts pale into significance when it comes to the past impacts of fishing and fishing technology itself. As fishing strategies and technologies have developed over the past couple of centuries, fisherpeople and fishing communities have moved from subsistence-level coastal exploitation to the industrial harvesting of the deep oceans. Once limited by the size of boats, by the utility of maps and charts, by the vagaries of weather and tide, contemporary fishing enterprise traverses the globe guided by satellite and digital technologies literally scraping what remains of the flora and fauna under the surface from the oceans. Fishing has even begun to fish down the genus and species divides and seek new markets for oceanic life forms that humans would never have considered consuming in the past, but now simply are forced to, given the unavailability of past favourites. North Korean fishing will also find itself subjected to the paucity of catch now available in its seas and in any others available to it. Pyongyang’s difficult history when it comes to technological and capacity development will see it challenged when it is only those nations and enterprises with the most advanced and functional technology that will have any sort of advantage in the future.

This book, is therefore focused primarily on a problematic sovereign space, which has long sought to deploy dangerous and disruptive materials in both its own defence and for hypothetical offence. It is also focused on another material of great interest to North Korea This is a material which has not only always been problematic for North Korean institutions to best harness or extract, but which is now subject to depletion and diffusion across the globe in a way which could not have been imagined in 1948 when the nation was founded. This author has in past writing sought to explore the history of other materials and products in North Korea’s developmental history, which similar to fish have been important to its political and ideological narratives and perceived as vital to its governmental offer and institutional functionality.'* Forests and timber, as well as minerals including coal, uranium and molybdenum, have been seen in this way by North Korea’s governments over the decades among other examples.! Much writing on North Korea and its politics has it that history, ideology and ethnic identity are the greatest materials so far as Pyongyang is concerned, and it is these materials which almost above everything else shape and impact life in that nation.'° In a sense, this would have it that North Korea is a state of politics to the exclusion of everything else. While on the face of it this can appear true—as politics and ideology do have a tendency to seep very deeply into the everyday lives and social frameworks of North Koreans—this book suggests that other physical materials play a real role in the web of functionality and authority that Pyongyang uses in order to assert its legitimacy as a government.

'4Winstanley-Chesters (2014). 13 Winstanley-Chesters (2018b).

‘Myers (2010).

But how do materials themselves play a role in the politics and authority of a nation, especially non-sentient materials and particularly in a nation which places such importance in the physical legacies of its rulers? This book, and this will be explained in a later chapter in greater detail, essentially holds that materials and material objects themselves are capable of and bestowed with power and agency in the political and functional frameworks and ecosystems that make up a nation. Two particular bodies of thought are useful in understanding this idea. First, that of Jason Moore on the role and place of ecological elements and ecologies in what he terms ‘the web of life.’'’ Moore’s work resolves primarily around the place of ecology and ecological materials within the functioning and intersections of Capitalist models and modes of government, economics and society. That Coltan you have in the mobile phone which you rent from a multinational corporation and from which other multinational corporations extract your personal data and information, selling them to other corporations in order that they might advertise other products (such as other mobile phones), to you, by virtue of the value generated by both tangible and intangible assets (which are themselves both traditional and very new), becomes lively and active as a material in global politics." In Coltan’s case, it is the material both lively enough to enslave indigenous populations for its extraction and to generate wars and armed conflicts such as the Second Congo War that have cost many human lives and disrupted political and economic development as well as societies for decades.'? Minerals and ecological materials can be extremely lively and energetic in these webs of life and it is this author’s assertion that Moore’s model does not necessarily have to work exclusively in political and economic systems that might classified as a capitalist or even post-capitalist. It is quite possible that non-capitalist or anti-capitalist webs of life could have similar energies at work and North Korea might just be such a case.

Aside from the work of Moore and ecological elements and materials in these webs of life, this book secondarily utilises the work of philosopher Jane Bennett and those Human Geographers such as Sarah Whatmore who have extended her ideas into the home discipline of this author. Bennett suggests that non-human and non-sentient creatures, physical materials, tectonic and forces such as gravity be considered vibrant matter.” At the most basic and reductive level, this vibrancy can be related to the vibrancy of particles in the atomic nuclei of all elements which make up the universe. Unless reduced to Absolute Zero (0 on the Kelvin scale of temperature or —273.15 °C), these particles continue to move around each other, in a sense vibrating. However, these creaturely and material energies are much more than that, they are energetic and vibrant in multiple ways. As the study of human biology develops scientists become more and more certain that the separation between human and nature, between in here and out there is not only diffuse, but

Bennett (2010).

impossible. Human beings are not one creature but an assemblage, network and symbiotic community of human DNA, viruses, bacteria and other forms of life.”! Sometimes esoteric players in this community such as the feared Free Radicals (unpaired ions) which appear to spark diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as perhaps play a key role in the ageing process itself, cause death and destruction for the human body, but mostly humans simply could not live without these silent, lively partners.” The vibrancy and liveliness of such materials make human life as we understand it possible. So it is with other life forms, objects, forces and materials, the processes they support or contain, the value they hold, the impact they have, the capabilities granted by them make them either vital to include with the processes of political, economic, technological or social life, or fundamentally necessary to avoid. This vibrancy, therefore, has power, what Bennett terms ‘Thing Power,’ through which and by which these materials and objects support or disrupt the functioning of human life and human politics or development.” Bennett also suggests understanding this power as a distributed sense of agency among non-human things, agency no longer as Descartes and much post-enlightenment philosophy would have it rooted in the human individual, but distributed across and into the planet, no longer dependent on the individual for its projection.”

Surely such a concept cannot work within the framework of North Korean politics, a nation so wholeheartedly rooted in human stories and the power and agency of a person and their relatives? How can the story of Kim Il Sung as father of the North Korean nation and ‘man as the master of all things’ and capable seemingly according to national narrative of almost single-handed defeating the Japanese colonial forces and the combined forces of the United States, United Nations and Republic of Korea during the Korean War, fit within this idea? Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung have in the past categorised North Korea’s ideological framework as being one of Charismatic Politics, closely connected to a Theatric politics as recognised by Clifford Geertz in sixteenth-century Bali.” Through the performance and reperformance of past moments of political or ideological importance, North Korea’s political leaders and regime reconnect to the authority of vital moments of authority and revolutionary energy. This energy can be then re-materialised in the present to support North Korea’s government and political system at a time when it is much less successful and functional.” Readers might think that such materializations might only involve the person of Kim Il Sung during the period of colonial struggle against the Japanese in the 1930s, or family

Richardson (1993).

3K won and Chung (2012). 6Winstanley-Chesters (2015).

members of his such as Kim Chong Suk, his wife at the time.” However, non-human objects and materials have played a key role in some of this charisma and theatre throughout the history of North Korea, and have captured some of the energy of that political charisma. Boulders, rocks and trees in the mountains and wilderness of the north of the nation proved almost cosmologically helpful during battles against Japanese forces in the North Korean narratives. Indeed, they were so helpful that the stories which recount the travails of Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas suggest that in some way these material objects were supportive of the future North Korean leader’s struggle. Kim Il Sung and his first wife, Kim Chong Suk’s relationship was first acknowledged in North Korea’s historical narratives by the side of a lake, underneath a copse of birch trees.” While no humans are alive who were present at this moment which is of extreme importance to North Korean politics (because Kim Jong Il and the entire national dynasty springs from this meeting and this relationship), and therefore capable of serving as witnesses to the moment, the trees themselves are. Thus, the birch trees which once shaded the picnic held by the guerrillas in between skirmishes with the Japanese and have a place in the background of this important photo in the lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Chong Suk are the only witnesses to the moment are used by North Korea in the complex network of commemorative moments in the nation; they stand in for humans and themselves project some of the charisma of that moment.?”” In more recent years at the death of Kim Jong Il, a variety of flora and fauna in North Korea was said to have participated in the mourning, bears were seen following what had once been the Dear Leader’s path, red-necked cranes adopted mourning postures and there were even instances of migrating birds simply falling dead from the air at the exact moment of his death.” Just as the birth of Kim Jong Il in 1942 was marked in North Korean historiography by a star in the sky, his death even involved more geologic and basic forces as the ice covering Heaven Lake/Ch’dnji (41%]) on top of Paektusan/ Baekdusan (#4*~)was said to have cracked as he died and the rocks around his signature inscribed on the side of the moment glowed red.*' One does not need to be a human citizen of North Korea to channel some of the charisma of its politics and history.

This book will explore these non-human possibilities in North Korean politics and their role within the networks of its charismas. There will not be many trees of, but plenty of fish, fishing infrastructure and fishing technologies. The book will explore the histories and geographies of fishing on a global scale, before considering fishing in East Asia and the Pacific, with a deeper level of focus on North Korea, finally recounting fieldwork there and in neighbouring nations. While Korea, as readers will discover has not historically been a nation at home in the

?7Winstanley-Chesters et al. (2016). *8Tbid.

"bid.

3°Kim Jong Il Death (2011).

3'Tbid.

deep sea, efforts made by the Western countries and the peninsula’s former colonial master, Japan in the late nineteenth century in tandem with developing technologies such as steam power, iron and steel manufacturing and onboard refrigeration extended the distance from the coast that fishing could be successfully achieved.** Nations such as the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada and Japan, from 1919 in possession of Germany’s former South Pacific territories, with these nineteenth-century technologies and further developments in the twentieth century within both the pre-1939-1945 war and Cold War periods would develop what Carmel Finley has termed an ‘Empire of Fishing’ in the Pacific.** These were of course, in fact, several opposing empires, but these nations would see to it that no space or territory in the Pacific Ocean was without the extractive touch of industrial fishing and places once thought of as highly peripheral to global politics such as the Bonito Islands and Samoa became integral to both industrial and military complexes.** During the Japanese colonial period, Korea’s Government General followed similar patterns of fisheries infrastructure development as that of mainland Japan. There were a series of fisheries stations and fisheries research institutions built on the peninsula as part of the network of institutions already existing in Japan (and other colonies such as Formosa (Taiwan).°° While much of this infrastructure was lost in 1945, and many of the larger fishing boats sailed for mainland Japan in the weeks following the end of Japanese colonial rule, Korean sensibilities regarding the sea had changed somewhat.*° Following the stasis of the 1950s under the Syngman Rhee administration, South Korean fishing boomed in the 1960s and 1970s and the southern half of the peninsula became one of the global fishing giants.*’ North Korea could not look on and disregard this since capabilities and capacities in the deep sea had not only become a mark of a developed, modern, powerful nation, but one which its rival in the Cold War had become a master of. If North Korea was to be a legitimate nation, with political and governmental authority of the type necessary in this era of competition it would need to become a fishing nation, need to build a fishing empire of its own.

North Korea’s efforts to do just this, to extend the reach of its fishing institutions out into the Pacific, to develop fisheries research and infrastructure which would help it do this and to find both home and foreign markets for the fruits of its efforts at sea are some of the key elements of this book. The importance of fishing and fisheries science including ship and infrastructure building to Kim Il Sung and to later North Korean leaders is considered in this book, building on past writing by its author.*® This is also the case with the effort that North Korean institutions have

32S arhage and Lundbeck (1992).

3 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (1946). 3°United States Army Forces Pacific (1946).

3 8Winstanley-Chesters (2016).

made to incorporate fishing and fishing capabilities into its political and ideological makeup and frameworks. North Korea’s charismatic politics necessarily has to provide a space for each developmental sector and all the materials and products which each sector generates. Fishing is in a sense something of a diffuse and opaque exercise. Fishing people go out into the endless sea and cast their nets, lines, hooks and other technologies into the depths hoping to extract a living product, which acts in mysterious and confusing ways. When one factors in the vagaries of the weather, the tides and all the mishaps and dangers that can happen at sea the exercise can appear even more opaque. Even with the technologies now available to the modern well-resourced fisherperson, there may be days and nights when the nets come up empty, the radar is misunderstood and the opportunities are lost, the fish simply cannot be found. How could this randomness and occasional disappointing lack of success be included within a political and developmental frame which essentially is predicated on a modernist assumption and desire for ever-increasing capability and capacity? How could a politics and ideology of supposedly rationalist certainty connect with the realities of danger, confusion, disappointment and mistakes at sea.? This book explores these and other interesting challenges for North Korean politics and development, challenges which, it perhaps might not surprise the reader have not been met entirely successfully. However, fishing capabilities and capacities are in 2019 still an important part of North Korea’s governmental offer. Kim Jong Un, the current leader of North Korea, third in the dynasty, is still pictured visiting fisheries stations, still is pictured holding up a fish, standing on a fishing boat, briefly visiting the inside of a refrigeration unit full of frozen slabs of Pollack.*? He does this because to make these visits, to make these connections with this industry of the sea is important symbolically and practically to assert his role as leader of the nation, head of the dynasty and his hope for the developmental future and food supplies of his people.

All this is not to say that this book is entirely about North Korea. Although Pyongyang’s efforts at sea and the place of vibrant, energetic fishing matters within its politics and ideology are the key elements of this authors writing, it is not the only nation involved. While North Korea to this day insists on its politically vital sense of self-reliance as a nation as one of the key governmental planks of its being, it has of course never been entirely self-reliant on anything. North Korea has never been so much as an island, in common with John Donne’s hypothetical individual from his seventeenth-century English poem ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.’ North Korea was part of a complex network of geopolitical and economic connections during the Cold War, a difficult member of the family of international Communism and an at times complicated member of the Non-Aligned Movement. ? North Korea was often a difficult partner for other nations, but it saw itself as a member of a global group of nations which were brought together by a commitment and energy to overthrow the shackles of colonialism and a sensibility best described as Liberationism.*' While this could on occasion involve non-state actors such as the Black Panther Party in the United States, for the most part, North Korea engaged nation states.** To this day, North Korea remembers its links of socialist and anti-colonial solidarity with nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Syria and Palestine.“ North Korea was also deeply connected to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Pyongyang gained a great deal in aid in kind, technical and developmental support from both of those nations during the Cold War, often playing one-off against the other at times in which the two had a geopolitical disagreement.** Soviet and Chinese technical specialists and bureaucrats helped support North Korean agriculture, forestry and hydrology as well as many other developmental fields.*° It would not be surprising, therefore, if nations such as the Soviet Union and other neighbouring nations were connected to North Korea’s maritime history and if North Korea had not engaged them in order to develop its fishing industry. Given North Korea’s general history of geopolitical connection, these connections were not easy, and this book recounts, in particular, some difficult moments between Pyongyang and the Soviet Union over fishing rights and collaborations.*° In this process of considering North Korean fishing in a manner which does not separate it from other contexts and the wider frames of fishing history and geopolitical development in the Pacific and East Asia, this book also attempts to think beyond the strictures of the nation state and its institutions. To do so, it considers life in fishing communities in North Korea, and in particular, one fishing community, long included in the political and ideological narratives of that nation, but bestowed with a very complicated geographical position. However, the book also looks beyond North Korea and encounters fishing communities and their infrastructures in neighbouring nations, especially those unfortunately gifted by circumstance-complicated or challenging environments. In particular, the book explores fishing communities on the Liaodong Peninsula of the People’s Republic of China, Gageodo island in South Korea and Primorsky Krai in the Russian Federation, both not far at all from North Korea and both in a complicated environmental and political framework.

“Ibid.

‘Haggard.

“Koh (1978).

“6Winstanley-Chesters (2018).

Readers will hopefully have got the sense that this book is ambitious, whether it is ambitious as North Korea’s historical efforts to develop its fishing capabilities and capacities to be a nation of the deep sea is debatable of course, as debatable as most things about North Korea. Such an ambitious book requires a framework of academic literature and methodologies behind its core desires and themes. This section as might be expected, will start with North Korea itself and writing and thinking on that nation. I do not aim to give a comprehensive outline of writing on North Korea, because this book does not aim to be a comprehensive or holistic guide to the nation itself. A key feature of writing or thinking on North Korea is that more than most nations of the globe, such work focuses primarily on its leadership, military and security history. North Korea’s place in the Japanese colonial breakdown, the Korean War, the Cold War, potential future hot wars against the United States and its potential desire for a unilaterally forced unification with its estranged southern sibling. Very few pages and very little academic effort have/has been expended in considering other aspects of North Koreas history, economy and social makeup. Only recently have writers begun to attempt to consider “everyday lives’ in North Korea, primarily because those lives are for external writers and analysts so hard to reach and connect with. This book is not the first to consider the nation’s developmental history in the English language, but it is certainly the first to consider North Korean fishing histories and fishing communities.