Tragedy in a Connective Sea

In another key, tragedy offers a complementary approach to understand­ing connection in any body of water, which also works around national­ist impulses. Put another way, the hard fact of what the poet T.

In Russian terms, the sea it shares with Japan and Korea remains in many ways less part of the nation's past than of its future - as does much of Russia's far east, which commands most of this ocean's shore­line, urging forward the significant expansion of its naval bases in the region today. With only a few intrepid Russian explorers reaching this region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and chiefly tak­ing an interest in this sea as a means to head onwards to the fabled ‘Isles of Gold' as Europeans then described Japan - for Russians the first substantial introduction to this ocean's far reaches came in the very late nineteenth century in Anton Chekhov's The island: A journey to Sakhalin.^[595] Chekhov's chronicle results from a government assign­ment to compile a convict census of the penal colony that was Sakhalin Island between 1868 and 1905. It was the last jail built in the notori­ous Romanov corrective system where over 30,000 political and crimi­nal offenders endured or succumbed to the worst conditions in the empire. The distance to Sakhalin from Moscow (where most of the prisoners originated) is ‘nearly one-quarter of the earth's circumfer­ence', and, having survived this trek, upon arrival the innkeeper greeted Chekhov by flatly asking why he had come to ‘this godforsaken hole'.^[596] Chekhov's prose detailed not only the prisoners' death-in-life conditions, but also makes a composite sketch of the nearly 10,000 ‘former con­victs who were required to remain in exile and had been granted set­tler status, of family members who had accompanied the prisoners from need or love or both, and of the children born either on the island or on the lengthy trip to it’.^[597]

In 1905, the southern half of Sakhalin Island became a war spoil for Japan as a result of its nation’s defeat of Russia - the final moments of victory for Japan in a decisive naval battle at the opposite end of this sea in the Tsushima Straits.

These snows conceptually connect back much further in time to engage the sum total of countless images and histories within Japan that continue to colour for Japanese an enduring perception of this entire region, its coastline, and sea beyond as ‘the backside of Japan’ (literally, Ura Nihon as it all remains commonly called in Japanese addition to the more proper geographic names). Some of the most revealing among these histories revolve around the port city of Niigata (earlier Echigo), located where the Amurian plate and the Okhotsk plate converge and appear to make Japan itself twist sideways north. Importantly, the bleak­ness that this area engenders within Japanese society intersects with cen­turies’ long practice of using this sea itself as a place for banishment and exile. During Japan’s classical and early medieval eras, when court officials decided that certain emperors, priests and poets were guilty of heretical thought, they expelled them from the splendour of the capitals at Kyoto and Kamakura on the country’s southern face and put them out to sea at Maze, among other departure ports, close to Niigata.

Regardless that this sea did not have a name in Japanese until about 200 years ago - or maybe because of it - the frequent absence of even a horizon line instilled dread as inky dark skies become one with even darker waters. Among others, Emperor Juntoku endured twenty winters off of Niigata’s coast on Sado Island in its coffin-like fog and thunder snows before his death in 1241, while the dramatist Zeami Motokiyo, Japan’s most famous Noh author, was exiled to Sado for the year in 1434 on charges that are still unclear. During the early modern era, police in Edo (today’s Tokyo) regularly sent prisoners and poor people to work to their deaths in the gold mine on Sado.

Moreover, the utter destruction of Japan's modern empire enshrouded this region in the image of defeat, not least because at the empire's height in the 1930s it was filled with such promise for its planners. Niigata became the main exit point for several million Japanese soldiers and set­tlers heading to secure their nation's ‘Manifest Destiny' in northern Korea and northeastern China, on a historically reversed migration pattern of people moving from Japan to the continent. On 1 September 1931, the Japanese Railway Company opened the new Joetsu trunk line from Tokyo to Niigata, which conveyed Japanese emigrants to ocean liners such as the Gassan, which alone took tens of thousands of Japanese to ports such as Wonsan and Najin on the northeastern Korean coast from which point they would head inland to seek their fortunes on the continent.^[599] The total devastation of the Japanese empire in 1945 meant that roughly six million settlers out of a Japanese population of 72 million - the prepon­derance having relocated to north China - worked their way back to Japan as best they could, although ‘home' and ‘return' for many people were strange concepts having been born and raised abroad, never having set foot in Japan proper.^[600] In addition, in August 1945, the Soviet Union took captive as many as 700,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians - many of them included the settlers to the southern half of Sakhalin - imprison­ing them in Siberian gulags where a horrifically high death rate prevailed (up to 60,000 fatalities).^[601] Russia held hundreds of thousands of these people in labour camps as late as 1956, with a few not returning to Japan until the 1990s.

In the immediate wake of the Allied forces’ 1945 destruction of Japan, the Korean War erupted (1950-53). Amid what was predominantly a series of land and air campaigns, the United Nations led a naval block­ade that was the longest in modern history at the North Korean port of Wonsan from February 1951 to July 1953. Shortly before it began, how­ever, on 23 December 1950 the SS Meredith Victory set sail from there to Geoje Island near Busan on Korea’s far southern coast, about 500 miles away. Today that ship is known informally as the ‘Ship of Miracles’ partly because of the Christmas season with which its action coincided and partly because of what it accomplished: the greatest humanitarian rescue operation from land by ship. Captain Leonard LaRue ordered his crew to unload all weapons and extraneous supplies from the Meredith and refit the 10,000-ton cargo ship designed for sixty crewmembers and twelve passengers to accept as many refugees as possible. With little food or water, nearly 14,000 people stood one against another for three win­try days at sea, disembarking along the country’s southern coast on 26 December 1950.

Following the 1953 armistice between the United States and North Korea, yet before Japan resumed formal relations with either North or South Korea, in 1959 an unusual ferryboat service was launched that regularly departed the Japanese port of Niigata for the North Korean port of Wonsan. A Soviet-flagged passenger ship, the Kurilion, first set sail from Japan in December 1959, evolving during the next two dec­ades into the North Korean-built Mangyonbong. The ship continued to course back and forth with its passengers atop water that was dominated underneath its surface by US and Russian submarines playing precarious games of cat and mouse with one another. The ferryboat itself drew lit­tle reaction in Japan although the Niigata-based ‘Japanese North Korean Return Assistance Association’ tried hard to give it a place of pride, regu­larly touring the city’s schoolchildren and ladies’ associations aboard the ship, holding festive and well-documented parties for those leaving Japan (recording the restaurant, the menu, who attended, whether they wore traditional Korean dress or Western fashions), and marking the ship’s commemorative moments (10,000th passenger, 50,000th, fifteenth year) with banners and posters hung throughout the city’s downtown area.

The passengers who rode this ferry included groups of children of Korean ethnicity in Japan on required school field trips to the ‘Fatherland’, as well as people visiting relatives and tourists.^[602] Additionally, a group of people only decades later understood to be part of a much more confus­ing scheme rode this ship too. In the mid-1950s, Japanese and North Korean leaders and the International Committee of the Red Cross organ­ised and legitimated the planned removal of Koreans in Japan to North Korea as part of the ‘Great Patriation of the Fatherland'.^[603] Between 1959 and 1984, roughly 93,000 people crossed this sea this way, yet they were never allowed to leave North Korea (as they had been promised they would). Only recently have the inner workings of this history come to light, raising problematic questions of ‘who knew what when?' and ‘did ethnic cleansing really take place in postwar Japan?' Most pressingly now as North Korean refugees to Japan and elsewhere recount stories of their lives: ‘Can anything be done to help those still alive and wanting to get out?'^[604]

An equally complicated Cold War history of this sea worked in the other direction, and only confirmed in 2002: North Korea's state-sponsored abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.^[605] In what seems like a pitch for a really bad movie, the horrific reality involved North Korean scuba-diving frog agents emerging from the sea and kidnapping Japanese citizens as they went about their daily lives along the coast: two were in their car on a date at the beach, for example, while another, Yokota Megumi, was thirteen years old in 1977 and walking home from badminton practice at her Niigata middle school when she was snatched. In 2002, following headline-grabbing revelations, five returned to Japan by plane; their children and spouses followed two years later, with the most awkward case involving an abducted Japanese woman, who after her kidnapping was forcibly married to Charles Robert Jenkins, an American who had deserted his army post along the demilitarised zone in South Korea in 1965 to protest the war in Vietnam by defecting north.

The nightmare abduction plan aimed to train spies perfectly fluent in ‘native’ Japanese; the 93,000 repatriates trapped there - with most now dead - having long been deemed of dubious patriotism as far as their allegiance to North Korea was concerned, thus untrustworthy regardless of language fluency (and this includes the several thousand Japanese women who accompanied Korean husbands ‘home’ to a North Korea most had never seen before).^[606] The practical details of this plan were launched in the late 1940s, shortly after the official creation of separate South and North Korean regimes when North Korean intel­ligence agents routinely kidnapped South Korean fisherman all along the Korean peninsula’s east coast to gain information as well as to increase their population. Unsurprisingly, Koreans were sympathetic to the plight of abducted Japanese yet collectively bewildered by the levels of outrage over a few Japanese compared with the thousands of their own similarly lost to this sea.

There is no tangible evidence that the Mangyongbong ferry and the abducted Japanese are of a piece, yet when the abductee story broke in Japan in 2002, the surrounding maelstrom swept the ferry and its history into its midst. Overnight, the ship itself became one with kidnapping Japanese, its separate and sad history moot. In this context, the sea itself continues to resonate hard all around. What, then, of the few boats of North Korean refugees who appear on it now? Known as ‘ghost ships’ in Japan where in addition to the Russian coastline the small craft wash ashore with skeletons or decomposing corpses - the numbers increasing during winter months when the winds shift - eighty appeared along vari­ous spots of Japan’s northern coastline in 2013, sixty-five in 2014, and forty or so in 2015. Thus, in such light it is noticeable that the intense international discussion about what might happen to North Korea’s 22 million people should the country collapse contains little productive conversation about a potential exodus over the sea.

Equally important to consider, the name of the sea did not matter to the 269 people of sixteen nationalities who died on 1 September 1983 when Korean Airlines (KAL) Flight 007 crashed into the waters off of Moneron Island. En route from New York to Seoul, the plane was 300 miles off of its charted course and deep in Russian air space at the height of the Cold War. With no response from KAL pilot Captain Chun Byung-in to verbal or hand communication or warning shots, the pilot of a Soviet Su-interceptor, Major Gennadi Osipovich, shot at the hydrau­lics systems near the passenger plane's tail, causing it to spiral out of the sky for several horrible minutes and disintegrate on impact.^[607] Nearly ten years later in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union Russian President Boris Yeltsin transferred flight transcripts and other materials to victims' families, who, thus, would learn that their loved ones had died aware of their impending deaths, which only compounded grief relat­ing to the fact that very few human remains and only tiny bits of debris were ever found.^[608] With the information, Hans Ephraimson-Abt, father of twenty-two-year-old Alice who died, told reporters, ‘We have been struggling to know what happened for years to our loved ones. Now we face the agonizing recognition that their death was neither painless nor instant.'^[609]

Setting aside a never-ending cycle of speculation, the reality of this sea at this moment in human history was primed for controversy. Recovery teams faced a web of man-made impediments in the form of Cold War lines drawn on top of the water that could not be crossed. Which side would con­duct search and recovery operations? Where? United States' alliance struc­tures with South Korea and Japan versus Russia determined that the South Korean owners of the airplane designated American and Japanese rescue teams. For its part, the Soviet Union included Moneron and Sakhalin Islands off whose shores Russian military divers searched for the plane, which they presumed they would find. It had entirely disintegrated, how­ever, leaving only mangled pieces the size of a car door at best. During the weeks to come, civilians on the two islands hunted for scant shards of the jet and its passengers as they washed ashore.

Meanwhile, although twelve-mile national territorial limits in the sea were standard at the time throughout the world, Japan had three-mile limits in this sea's northern and southern straits so that American ships could carry nuclear weapons with greater breathing room. Only in 2009 did Japanese officials confirm the long-suspected detail about Japan's unusually constrained control over its own sea.^[610] The American over­lord sleight of hand transgressed international territorial norms in the sea and undercut Japan’s legally enshrined ‘non-nuclear’ status - a post- 1945 proscription on possessing nuclear weapons on land and sea - and only added more barriers to the aftermath of the KAL disaster in the waters northwest of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Today, on Hokkaido’s northern tip at Cape Soya is a plea for peace embod­ied in monument to the plane’s victims, a soaring concrete structure in the shape of an enormous origami crane, like the little paper ones at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.