Connective Threads

Noticeably, the ninth- and tenth-century diplomatic ocean network between the northern area of Korea and Japan evaporated as quickly as the more recent twentieth-century reverse immigration routes from Japan to the continent.

It can be jarring to move back and forth between the countries sur­rounding this sea and to jump through different chronological time periods at once, yet, in the case of this sea, it is historically productive. Put differently, exploring this sea's richness via spots along its coastlines and islands - rather than one nation at a time or time period after time period - helps create a sense of this oceanic history as a connective place for the region and beyond as well as its future possibilities.

To begin, this body of water's vital and unusually warm current is its most crucial thread. Over the course of the past fifteen to twenty million years that the Japanese main islands have been back-arc spread­ing from the Asian mainland and tectonically creating the physical space for this body of water to come into being, this famous ocean current - also known as the Japan Current - has brought fish larvae, plankton and other food to the myriad creatures inhabiting this sea.^[569] In short, as the nineteenth-century English geographer and hydrographer Alexander George Findlay described, the Kuroshio is ‘a remarkable stream’.²¹ At 46 degrees north latitude, Japan’s life-giving Kuroshio Current even makes for pleasant swimming during summer months at the sea’s northern­most reaches on the beaches of the lush, tiny island of Moneron, off the southern tip of Russia’s Sakhalin Island.

Hydrographer Arthur Findlay published numerous texts during the second half of the nineteenth century, but his North Pacific directory became the American and European ship captain’s essential guide, ulti­mately becoming a helpful template for Japanese and Korean hydrog­raphers who continue to engage this science and make significant

oceanographic knowledge’, in Keith R. Benson and Philip F. Rehbock, Oceanographic history: The Pacific and beyond (Seattle, WA, 2002), pp. 86-95, esp. pp. 89-90.

²¹ Alexander George Findlay, North Pacific directory: A directory for the navigation of the North Pacific Ocean with its descriptions of its coasts, islands, etc., from Panama to Behring Strait and Japan, its winds, currents, and passages (London, 1870), p.

²² See John Dunmore, Where fate beckons: The life of Jean-Francois de la Pe (Fairbanks, AK, 2008). (The name of Moneron Island is spelled slightly differently from the navigator, Monneron.)

²³ Brett L. Walker, ‘Mamiya Rinzo and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and empire’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007): 283-313.

²⁴ The Japanese name for the island (Kaibaito) was an intentionally Japanised Chinese character reading of the indigenous Ainu name, Todomoshiri, which literally means ‘Sea lions live here’; the best English-language treatment of Ainu people and their world stems from an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center in 2000. Co-curated by William Fitzhugh and Chisato Dubreuil, the catalogue they co-edited is splendid: Ainu: Spirit of a northern people (Seattle, WA, 2001). refinements to Findlay's initial observations of this sea.^[570] Importantly, Findlay captured a moment that marked this ocean's global trajectory, making his work historically significant beyond its precise measurements of currents and ocean depths. In the book's second edition (1870), he observed, ‘The period which has elapsed [since 1850] has held a more important influence on the social and commercial progress of the world than any recorded in history, and in no part has this change been more evident than in the countries around the North Pacific Ocean.'^[571] The text added a key detail that guided this shift that was only at that time being appreciated beyond the region: ‘The Japanese Current... is an immense stream... and is exactly analogous to the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic.'^[572]

Forking in two at the tip of the Ryukyu Islands in the East China Sea, one trajectory heads north around Tsushima Island, splitting in two again into the Tsushima Current and the East Korea Warm Current, which together bring southern saline-charged nutrients across the sea to the Tsugaru Strait, between Hokkaido and Japan's primary island, Honshu.

The Kuroshio's warm northerly branch makes Vladivostok Russia's only ice-free Pacific port and home to the Russian Pacific fleet. Distressingly, throughout the Cold War Russia took enormous licence with its con­trol over these waters and dumped astonishing amounts of radioac­tive waste up through the 1990s, including two nuclear reactors off the coast of North Korea in 1978.^[573] Today, North Korea maintains several nuclear facilities along this ocean’s coastline, while South Korea operates three. For its part, Japan operates the world’s largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility, south of Niigata, an area of Japan known in earlier times as Echigo, this coast’s central port and critical to the coun­try’s early modern economy for rice, fish, timber and salt, among many other goods. Merchants along this coastline perfected a near shore trade route known as the ‘Kitamaebune’ (literally the ‘northern bound ships’), which operated annually from the mid-seventeenth century through the advent of Western schooners in the region. Although the sails on these ships remained too weak in the face of this sea’s ferocious northerly winds to accomplish more than one trip per year, the ‘Kitamaebune’ trade was integral to the calculus of the world’s first commodity exchange at Osaka (in 1800 Osaka rivalled Paris in manifold ways, especially in terms of market economy).^[574] Ships departed from Osaka’s ports on Japan’s southern face into the Inland Sea and headed west through the Kanmon Straits dividing Honshu and Kyushu, and from there cruised along Japan’s northern coastline to what is today southern Hokkaido.

This sea’s expanse and terrible storms have long provided a natural security barrier for Japan - or, in the historian Amino Yoshihiko’s words, ‘an obstacle to intercourse’ - challenging potential invaders such as the Mongols, who tried twice in 1274 and 1281 to cross its waters’ narrowest reaches in the south, only to get trapped and repelled by typhoons - the original ‘divine winds’ (kamikaze).^[576] Ironically, however, the very rich­ness of life within this sea ultimately reeled in the outside world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making it the object of intense focus among Europeans and Americans, who finally ‘opened’ the region to global trade. The reason was straightforward and had nothing to do with imperialising apologetics of civilisation and enlightenment so preva­lent elsewhere in the world at the time. Counterbalancing the warm cur­rent in this sea is a cold water stream that heads straight down from the Arctic, providing optimal breeding conditions for the then most prized creatures of all: whales.

Whaling was not at all a foreign import to this sea. For millennia, open-boat, near-shore whaling practices were standard.^[577] Eight thou­sand-year-old petroglyphs depicting whales and whale-hunting scenes were discovered in 1971 along an ancient riverbed in Bangudae, near South Korea's port city of Ulsan and the centre of its whaling industry until Korea joined the international moratorium on whaling in 1986. At Bangudae, along a stream bed are several sites of these astonishing rock carvings - the world's oldest known - which were drawn at a time when the people living there trapped whales in nets after the huge creatures ventured inland in long disappeared brackish rivers and marshes (these, in turn, are just upstream from some of the planet's most perfectly pre­served 100 million year-old herbivorous dinosaur footprints, left in the mud millions of years before the nearby sea existed, let alone before any­thing resembling a human arrived).

Likewise, on the opposite side of this sea along Japan's northern coasts and islands, 15,000-year-old burial mounds confirm the consumption of whale meat, and Ainu legends recount whale-hunting and worship alike. To the outrage of many today, the government of Japan eschews global bans on whaling, and although Japan's butcher ships do not hunt in this sea, the Japan Whaling Association, a private organisation established in 1988, explains the nation's right to kill cetaceans in the Southern Ocean by summoning this northern sea's thousand-year-old harpooning tech­niques as justification for the current slaughter.^[579]

All this notwithstanding, the industrial whaling practices that European and American whalers introduced here in the nineteenth century would change whaling techniques forever for Japanese and Koreans - as well as make it impossible for Japanese and Korean leaders to keep their borders closed. In the mid-nineteenth century, ungainly whaling barks from the world’s predominant ports in places such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, cruised this sea during the summer’s ‘hunting’ season, able to boil strips of blubber on board during a voyage. The process called ‘trying out’ was such that a single ship could contain hundreds and often thousands of barrels of oil ready to sell when it entered port. This did away with countless middlemen and built new exchange markets in places such as Lahina, Maui and Port Lloyd on what is now Chichijima of the Ogasawara Islands, and allowed whaling ships to return north mul­tiple times to their kill in this sea and others in the North Pacific before returning home. All of this captured social geographer David Harvey’s understanding of the ‘elimination of spatial barriers and the struggle to “annihilate space by time” essential to capital accumulation’.^[580] Using the example of the bark Charles W Morgan, which was built and outfitted in New Bedford in 1841 for roughly $50,000 (a sum that amortised dur­ing the first of its eighty voyages), owners and investors were especially pleased when the price of whale oil peaked in 1856 at $1.77 per gallon. (A barrel held roughly 32 gallons.)^[581] They still lived comfortably when it was less than half of that in 1888, the year the National Geographic Society was established, and the Morgan spent the hunting season in this sea cruising along both the Japanese and Korean coasts.

Deeply entwined, therefore, in the international rhetorical fanfare of ‘opening’ Japan to the world in the mid-nineteenth century - Korea would follow a decade later - were the ways in which the first-comer United States government acted on behalf of the whaling industry in its endeavours. Ships’ logbooks to the regions of the northern Pacific including this sea were collectively known on many nineteenth-century American maps as the ‘Japan Grounds’ for the whales and prized pin­nipeds such as the spotted seals and sea lions hunted there and reveal the precarious nature of an entire area on the verge of forced engage­ment with Americans and Europeans and their commercial treaties of the industrial world.^[582] In 1851, Mercator Cooper, the only American whaling captain at the time known as a private individual to have made it safely in and out of Tokyo Bay (on Japan's Pacific coast) spelled this out in a letter to American government representatives:

I think their ports should be opened for the convenience of whalers as we have so many ships cruising along their coast none of which in case of wreck gain any assistance from them and from their distance from other ports they would perish before they could obtain help. As they are it would be more than useless for any ship to enter their ports.^[583]

As part of a global moment, whaling ships grew in intensity in the Sea of Japan/East Sea, where they increasingly encountered and res­cued stranded Japanese fishermen from far-flung rocks. Ironically, the Japanese government's determination to regulate everything on land - in this instance boat length - helped speed along its own collapse.^[584] In rigidly attempting to force Japanese to remain within a tightly drawn perimeter around the country, the Tokugawa shogun's command for ever-smaller boats created the unforeseen by-product of more castaways as smaller boats were more easily tossed about in storms. The casta­ways, in turn, encountered foreign whalers, which increased foreigners' knowledge about ‘locked Japan' (in Herman Melville's famous words). Graveyards along Japan's coasts remember many ‘lost at sea', not neces­sarily drowned but stranded.^[585]

Meanwhile, captivity narratives were wildly popular in American liter­ature, with plots revolving mainly around the feared red man - American Indians - abducting white boys and girls.^[586] There does not, however, seem to be a fictional account of a white man being taken hostage in Japan, making Ranald MacDonald’s official testimony detailing his real life 1848-49 capture along Japan’s northwestern coast and his subse­quent imprisonment all the more sensational then as well as histori­cally significant today.^[587] In 1848, MacDonald, a half-Chinook, half-Scot self-promoting adventurer (by his own account) used the money he earned working the ‘Japan Grounds’ on a ship called the Plymouth to purchase a small boat and keep it on deck with the express intent of hav­ing the captain lower him overboard along the northwest coast of Japan. MacDonald knew about the shogun’s strict laws forbidding foreigners’ access (although he does not seem to have known that the exclusion decree was rescinded in 1848); he claimed, nonetheless, that his ‘prin­cipal motive in this was... the mere gratification of adventure’.^[588] He made clear that he wanted the adventure that he got, yet once his story came to the attention of American journalists and officials who desired certain ends, its details were too useful to be spun into anything less than a hostage crisis involving an innocent American trapped by heathen on the anti-Christian island of Japan (in their collective telling, that is).

Beginning with the fallout from MacDonald’s testimony together with that of several other American sailors who had been taken prisoner in northern Japan after their ship Lagoda wrecked, newspaper columnists urged the US Congress to take action against Japan whose leaders in the act of capturing MacDonald and the others ‘forfeit all claim to respect as a civilized people, and may justly be regarded as hostile to the human race’.^[589] Ultimately, such views prevailed in the appropriations debates that would fund Commodore Matthew Perry’s enormously expensive and highly militarised expeditions to Japan between 1852 and 1854 to open ports to trade. Doing so, Congress at once assuaged whalers’ interests while also aligning with strategic planners who wanted to ‘get’ Japan before the British did to secure an American foothold in Asia.

International law at the time concurred with public discussion. In appointing Perry, United States’ Acting Secretary to the Navy, C. M. Conrad, emphasised:

When vessels are wrecked... on their shores, their crews are subjected to the most cruel treatment... [and with] great barbarity.^[590]

American commercial interests, he explained, were thus the cause of civi­lisation’s progress:

Every nation has undoubtedly the right to determine for itself the extent to which it will hold intercourse with other nations. This same law of nations, however, which protects a nation in the exercise of this right imposes upon her certain duties which she cannot justly disregard... none is more imperative than that which requires her to succor and relieve those persons who are cast by the perils of the ocean upon her shores.^[591]

In sum, the United States government argued that because Japanese leaders flouted international laws (of which they were unaware), the use of force if necessary was justified.

Meanwhile, to achieve its aim this power politics view of the sea would outright ignore this ocean’s connective possibilities such as friendly encounter. On 11 April 1850, the whaling ship Hannibal from New London, Connecticut, sailed along Japan’s northwestern coast, several hundred miles south of where MacDonald had gone ashore. The ship’s logbook describes the scene:

Light breeze. Land in sight and about 20 Jappanese Junks - Stood in for land and at 2 % PM when about 3 miles distant lowered 3 boats and pulled for the shore - taking guns and fishing gear. Saw along the shore great numbers of seal on the rocks - on landing found a party of Jappanese capturing seals for their oil and hides. Second mate gave a sailor’s knife and a short piece of towline for a fine looking calf. We got neither fish nor game - but returned aboard. Got up in chains and anchors ready to go.^[592]

The Hannibal's log-keeper, Nathaniel Saxton Morgan, was 17 and from Hartford, Connecticut. The next day - roughly three years before Matthew Perry’s ‘shock and awe’ entrance into Tokyo harbour - Morgan described what he could see of Honshu and Hokkaido:

The island of Nippon on one side and the mainland of Japan on the other. The land appears in a high state of cultivation and covered with luxuriant verdure. In passing through the straits we saw several apparently large towns and cities and immense herds of cattle - the Capt ordered the boats to be got ready to go on shore and shoot bullock but the wind freshening we stood our course which I think all for the best. We had a fine view of both sides of the straits - the island of Nippon and the Mainland - the wind some of the time being ahead we had to tack from shore to shore - This land is surely a paradise - lovely in the extreme.^[593]

Experiences like Morgan’s and a number of other Americans and Europeans contradicted the United States’ politically desired ends, which at that moment rested on making the Japanese government fully submit to American terms for trade. All of this makes this sea’s possibilities even more important today when thinking about contemporary pressures to ‘open’ North Korea, whose eastern coastline and people are integral to this connective world.

Ironically, too, the history of modern whaling connects to an addi­tional contemporary security problem in this sea. Japan’s Oki Islands and Korea’s Ulleugndo are among the sea’s remarkably few island groups - the largest of which also include Russia’s Sakhalin and Japan’s Sado. Both Oki and Ulleungdo have rich fishing traditions that include whal­ing, and today they boast cultures centred on squid and cuttlefish - with the squid-shaped public telephone booth near Oki Island’s main ferry port perhaps globally unique. Geologically distinct, Oki and Ulleungdo have ancient histories of kingly visits and/or exiles as early as the sixth and seventh centuries and also medieval era ‘wako’ pirate raids. Both are covered by similarly tall, thick grasses that in the sea’s wild wind make it appear at times as if green waves are carrying the ocean itself up the islands’ respectively steep inclines. Of note, however, one of Northeast Asia’s key flashpoints centres on several spiky spits of land that stand between Ulleungdo and the Oki Islands, and which hold one of the most surreal security distinctions in the contemporary world: the United States military is potentially obligated under separate agreements with South Korea and Japan to defend this territory for each side even though both sides claim the islands as ‘integral’ to their nations. The sharply pointed volcanic outcrop that Koreans know as Dokdo and Japanese call Takeshima is the focus of this bipolar state of affairs. The United States government tries hard to hide its complicit involvement in creating this mess among allies by publishing maps that label the islands with their nineteenth-century European name, the Liancourt Rocks, after a French whaling ship that nearly wrecked on them in 1849.^[594]