‘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.’1
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.2 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.3 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.4 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 famine5 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.6
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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 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.7
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.8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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.12 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.13 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.
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.14 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.15 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.16 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.
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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.’17 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.18 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.19 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.20 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 impossible. Human beings are not one creature but an assemblage, network and symbiotic community of human DNA, viruses, bacteria and other forms of life.21 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.22 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.23 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.24
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.25 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.26 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 members of his such as Kim Chong Suk, his wife at the time.27 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.28 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.29 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.30 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’ŏnji (천지) on top of Paektusan/Baekdusan (백두산)was said to have cracked as he died and the rocks around his signature inscribed on the side of the moment glowed red.31 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 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.32 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.33 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.34 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).35 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.36 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.37 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.38 This is also the case with the effort that North Korean institutions have 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.39 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.40 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.41 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.42 To this day, North Korea remembers its links of socialist and anti-colonial solidarity with nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Syria and Palestine.43 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.44 Soviet and Chinese technical specialists and bureaucrats helped support North Korean agriculture, forestry and hydrology as well as many other developmental fields.45 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.46 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.
1.1 Literature and Methodologies
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 Korea’s 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.
Writing on North Korean political and ideological history was first rooted in the academia of the Cold War. Works such as those by Chong-Sik Lee, Robert Scalapino and Dae-sook Suh although politically and ideologically tinged themselves serve as valiant first efforts at unpicking the histories of North Korea’s political elite and leadership dynasty. Suh’s history of Korean Communism, in particular, is an extraordinary piece of scholarship tracing the intellectual development of those who would later form the political leadership of the nation. Pyongyang and Kim Il Sung’s leadership would be sorely tested and nearly destroyed by the Korean War. As soldiers from the Republic of Korea actually managed during the war to dip their feet in the Amnok/Yalu (압록강/鸭绿江) River, North Korea was very nearly destroyed during the conflict and conflagration. The entry of the People’s Republic of China into the war in the guise of what was known as People’s Volunteers saved the future North Korea, but it also simply added yet another multinational aspect to it. The Korean War is often in the United Kingdom termed ‘the forgotten war,’ but in academia it has seldom been forgotten. Writing such as that by Bruce Cumings with his two-volume Origins of the Korean War rooted the conflict in the geopolitical and ideological frameworks of the Cold War. It was a hot war in a period which was scarcely ever entirely cold, a geography of war in which proxies and alternative forms of the main players in the primary exercise could test each other’s limits and boundaries. Not even the date of the outbreak of the war, nor who actually started it is entirely clear, but instead dependant on the ideological position of either writer or reader. Early writing on the Korean War has it almost exclusively focused as conflict involving the United States, China, North Korea and South Korea, with perhaps bit parts for the United Kingdom and Australia and ghostly appearances by the Soviet Union. More contemporary histories of the Korean War and this early period of North Korea’s existence such as those by Wada Haruki, Li Narangoa and Tessa Morris-Suzuki and later writing by Cumings has put other nations, actors and landscapes into the fray. Japanese merchant shipping crews, Mongolian Horses and the ecosystem of the peninsula itself have taken a place in the narratives of the conflict and its resolution. The Korean War was, after all, a catastrophically destructive conflict for nature and the environment. The United States carpet bombed North Korean cities and deployed napalm and a myriad of other defoliants and toxic chemicals for the first time on its landscapes, chemicals which would later become a great deal more famous in Vietnam. The United States aerial bombardment of North Korea was in the league of the bombing of Dresden, Vietnam and the later moments of shock and awe in the Gulf War, wantonly destructive. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas recounted that essentially the United States Air Force ran out of targets to bomb.47
The terrible desolation of the Korean War, although mitigated in narrative terms for North Korea’s historiography by the fact that essentially while as a nation it may not have won, it certainly did not lose the war, and a war that had been against the most powerful nation on earth, put development there back by many years. Much of North Korea’s industry and infrastructure was completely annihilated, as was much of its natural environment. As destructive and disruptive as this was, the despoliation allowed for a narrative of ideological leadership to be developed which extends into the future to this day. Contemporary scholars of North Korea such as Andrei Lankov recount that the Korean War also extinguished the lives of a great number of Kim Il Sung’s enemies and those of his political system. In 1953, Kim Il Sung was one of the few North Korean political leaders left standing and his power as unified by the final eradication of any other local intellectual groupings by the purge of the Yanan faction of Communists in 1956 (prior to this and the Korean War, North Korea’s political intellectuals had been a mixed bag of influences and traditions which reflected the complicated histories of left-wing political development in Korea).48 Kim Il Sung and the infrastructure both practical and ideological of the Korean Workers Party added elements of overcoming and triumphant survival against all the odds to previous narratives of guerrilla revolutionary struggle to their nationalist historiographies. North Korean politics has in a sense been living off these energies for many decades since, and they are in part the answer to the question posed sometimes by Americans, ‘why do the North Koreans hate us so much?’ Writing by Lankov, Szalontai and others details the political and ideological history of these times when North Korea rebuilt itself in the middle of competition within the Communist or Socialist bloc between the Soviet Union and Maoist China. This history includes a great deal of developmental playing off of one against the other, and North Korea’s usage of external finance, technical, material and bureaucratic support from both sides. All the while the ideological framework around North Korea’s politics and ideology has developed along particularly local and distinctive lines.
Much media and popular writing would always suggest that North Korea, its regime and leadership follows an ideology of Communism or Socialism. While Kim Il Sung and the leadership clique which surrounded him in the 1930s and 1940s and which became the governing class of North Korea certainly did claim at the time to be inspired by Marxist–Leninism and early writing by Kim Il Sung certainly references Marx and Communist ideology.49 After 1945, North Korea also incorporated mentions of Marxist–Leninism into its constitution and attempted to follow classical models of central planning and land reform in its first decades.50 North Korea, however, soon claimed that Kim Il Sung had developed an entirely new ideology. While Juche may not be entirely unfamiliar to analysts of East Asian ideology, similar ideas appearing for example in the writings of Japanese philosophers during the colonial and precolonial periods and even under Park Chung-hee in South Korea, North Korea has adopted the notion of self-reliance very enthusiastically in its political and historical narratives.51 As one might expect there are contrasting and competing views as to the coherence and content of Juche. Han S. Park of the University of Georgia offers an attempt at a systematic analysis of the core elements of the philosophy, essentially describing a set of four or five overarching principles through which political, social and economic development could be undertaken. These include a belief in the power of humanity over nature and the universe (expressed as ‘man is the master of all things’), radical collectivism, political transcendence (a loyal citizen can live forever with the leader), self-reliance and the primacy of the Kim family in the nation and system.52 Others such as the contrarian literary critic Brian Reynolds Myers assert that Kim Il Sung’s grand idea is not original at all, but instead a product and continuation of Imperial Japanese ethno-fascism.53 Still others like Gi-Wook Shin suggest that Juche is a continuation of the more radical Korean blood nationalism of Sin Ch’aeho (신채호)and Ch’oe Namsŏn (최남선). The contemporary consensus is agglomerating around the position of Andrei Lankov that North Korean ideology is a sort of national Stalinism with a strong ethnic commitment. This author would suggest that North Korean ideology whatever it represents is strongly aspirational in form and so quite flexible and reflexive when it comes to developmental matters.
North Korea has never really been ideologically pure, sound or committed when it comes to developmental matters and analysis by this author has shown that in nearly all economic fields Pyongyang has always been prepared to adopt new patterns of management and organisation, only to dump them or attempt something different a couple of years later. North Korea was very concerned following 1945 and the Korean War to imitate the patterns of economic development seen in the Soviet Union, before abruptly switching to the model of the Great Leap Forward offered by Maoist China, only to completely about-turn when it became clear that this was leading to disaster in China itself.54 In the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea ploughed a developmental middle path between both communist superpowers and other anti-colonialist nations of the Non-Aligned Movement.55 North Korea even attempted to export its developmental strategies in all fields to countries across the globe such as Grenada, Guyana, Libya, Syria, Guinea-Bissau and Zimbabwe.56 North Korean Friendship Farms still litter the planet in developing nations and Juche Study Groups from places which have been developmentally touched by the hand of Pyongyang still come to North Korea to pay homage on important political holidays and to offer their plaque to the basement of the Juche Tower.57 Scholars such as Kuark, Prybyla, Koh and Young have recounted the travails of North Korean development and international connections across the decades.58 North Korea itself has given a detailed and occasionally critical commentary of its work in fields such as forestry and agriculture, a commentary which this author has sought to unpick in previous writings.59
North Korea’s historical developmental narrative, of course, would be subject to fairly intense change after the collapse of what has been termed World Communism across the globe. The loss of the nation’s major international partners (if not exactly allies) such as East Germany and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s crippled North Korea’s economic system.60 Environmental degradation caused by the impact of that economic collapse, institutional management and a series of damaging weather and climate events brought about the near-complete fragmentation of the North Korean developmental and political system, leading to wide-scale famine and malnutrition.61 Many writers and analysts suggested that this would be the time not only for developmental collapse, but an almost inevitable unification of the peninsula because of the disappearance of North Korea. In fact North Korean developmentally ‘muddled through’ (as theorised by the work of Marcus Noland), and learnt some new strategies from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and agencies of the United Nations which sought to help the nation through this difficult period.62 Notions of ecological conservation, sustainability, organic agriculture, low-carbon economics and industry were learnt and deployed by North Korea to both get through the economic difficulties and to bolster its own legitimacy as a nation in the era of climate change—this includes connecting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process and attempting to gain accreditation for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects (as considered by Benjamin Habib).63 Sustainable or environmentally friendly practices such as solar and wind power generation have been predicated by some scholars as part of a wider framework of the North Korean state withdrawing from a great deal of its previous commitments to its citizenry at this time. The collapse, for instance, of the rationing or Public Distribution System for food gave space for the growth of what have been called guerrilla markets and an entirely separate system of food distribution, led by the North Korean public.64 North Koreans have also invested in solar power cells and small-scale wind generation technology to mitigate the failures of the wider electricity grid.65 Tolerance of these private enterprises has led to a mistaken sense that North Korea is going through a reform period, but it has also led to the possibility for individual citizens to extract value from their own labour and to develop a savings pot. Most of these citizens are, of course, connected to the elite of the Workers Party or the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and their offspring (known as Donju-in (돈 주인),66 who in tandem with investors and entrepreneurs from China have begun to make radical changes to the urban and build infrastructures of Pyongyang with new apartment complexes and leisure facilities spring up across the city.67
So far, none of the entrepreneurial spirit and environmental conceptual development has intersected with North Korea’s fishing sector. There is very little writing in English on the subject, other than that by the author of this book, but what there is suggests that North Korean fishing and fishing infrastructure while long a priority of the state, has never developed in quite the way anticipated by it. Once the preserve of fisheries cooperatives, now fishing has been placed in the framework of the Korean People’s Army and the benefits and value of the sector accrue to it. While brief glimpses of the power of this sector were seen, bizarrely for example at the death of Kim Jong Un’s uncle Jang Sung Taek in 2014, who it is rumoured had co-opted the value stream for the shipping of North Korean fish to China, which had once been in the control of the KPA, the sector and its communities is for the most part opaque.68 The scarcity and paucity of histories and writing on fishing and fishing people were one of the things that surprised me when I first started researching and thinking about fish and fishing people and places. While there is indeed a body of writing on fishing in Europe and North America, particularly on the herring fisheries of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Grand Banks and Whaling histories there is very little about Asia or the Pacific. I will recount what there is in greater detail in Chap. 2 of this book, but in outline fishing development as seen by this author is rooted in the work writing on fishing histories and development of Japan, the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union/Russian Empire/Russian Federation. These include fascinating works by Carmel Finley, Ryan Tucker Jones, William Tsutsui and David Howell on the construction of maritime and extractive empires in the Pacific, as well as the extraordinary work by Smith on the development of fisheries statistics and fisheries technology.69 Both of these in tandem have essentially stripped the sea and the seabed of its life for economic gain in a manner which on the face of it is hard to imagine. Writing on other East Asian fishing communities and the vibrant matter in their lives such as that by Edward Norbeck on the communities of Japan’s Inland Sea is equally important in conjunction with writing by Brandt on Korean fishing communities and the extraordinary work of Han Sangbok on the South Korean island of Gageodo (가거도), which became one of the field sites for this book.70
As a Human Geographer, field sites, be they land focused or sea based are encountered in a thick web of disciplinary history and theoretical framing. In particular, this author and this book have been deeply influenced by the work of Denis Cosgrove on symbolic landscapes (particularly important in the case of North Korea), Noel Castree on social and political landscapes, Neil Smith on notions of uneven or complicated development and Erik Swyngedouw on liquid politics and the place of hydrology within developmental dreams and strategies.71 This book is also influenced by the work of Jamie Lorimer on non-human charisma and by developing work on geographies of ruin and ruination.72 Given our environmental crisis and immanent ecological collapse, our planet in a sense is in ruins, and when it comes to the sea and the sea bed, this is doubly true. However, I do not wish to be entirely and overwhelmingly doom-laden about this fact, as things in a state of ruins can also revert to not being ruins, finding new means of being, new purposes, new accommodations with the wider web of life. I suggest that while one ecosystem may well be dying or on the verge of extinction, this does not mean that another will not take its place. This is what it is for things to be vibrant and lively (as Bennett, Whatmore and others suggest), to have power and agency in that web of life (as anticipated by Moore).
An equally important element for a Geographer’s work is to get out into the field and to encounter that web of life in the flesh so to speak. This book represents a number of encounters in the field, not just in North Korea, but in the countries and communities which have similar places in the landscape of politics and of fishing which neighbour it and share commonalities of both culture and difficulty. China’s Liaodong peninsula is close to North Korea and close to the historical narratives which have impacted on the Korean peninsula as well. Liaodong was colonised by the Japanese Empire, but before that Dalian and Lüshün were colonised by the British and then for a longer period by the Russian Empire. Dalian’s old Russian quarter still exists amidst the energy and power of the new China. Dalian is even building new aircraft carriers for the PLA Navy with which China will expand its power across more of the world’s oceans. Dalian in history was a fishing town, and fishing and fish have been rather offset by its new economic realities. The old fishing harbour and rail lines which once connected Dalian with colonial Korea now sit derelict behind a new Langham Place development. While the People’s Republic of China certainly has a complicated and difficult political structure for many, it is complicated in a different way entirely from North Korea. Fishing communities in and around Dalian fish virtually the same stretch of sea and estuary as North Korean fishers encountered by this book, in this sense they must be impacted by similar environmental and climatic issues as their colleagues across the border. The author of the book made fieldwork visits to Jinshitan (金石滩) and fishing communities near Lüshün (旅顺). These fishers were focused primarily on small fish and shellfish close to shore and along the main road from Dalian proper to Lüshün, there were a number of communities focused on seaweed and seaweed preparation. These were subjected to the obvious encroachment of speculative urban development, and in Jinshitan’s case, tourist development. Such development radically alters the value of land, and those interested in such development often in contemporary China have the ear of local government and institutional authorities which means that they have much greater priority than smaller communities whose assets have little value and do not fit into the development models which are the goal of much contemporary Chinese governmentality. Further afield from Dalian in the neighbouring county, Wafangdian City (瓦房店市), the author made a visit to Tong Shui Gou (通水沟) village, a community highly peripheral to the county organisation so less pressured by urban development. However, Tong Shui Gou’s fishers (who feature in the cover image for this book), appeared locked in a double bind. On the one hand, this community which focused primarily on shrimps and other crustaceans appeared to struggle under the control of middlemen, very familiar from Korean history, who set the prices, managed distribution and presumably supplied credit facilities. These men, dressed in black leather would dictate prices virtually by the minute in the bitter wind as the catch was loaded. On the other what the community managed to extract from the sea was very obviously heavily polluted. When pulled from the sea, the fishermen’s catch was full of plastic and other waste and detritus and the shrimps and other small fish damaged and degraded.
Environmental challenges were faced also in an entirely different field site for the research which forms part of this book. It was important to this author to consider an alternative Korean fishing community, one at diametric opposites to the fishing places and industry of North Korea. So, in tandem with legendary anthropologist and scholar of Korean fishing villages, Han Sangbok the author visited Gageodo, the most southwestern island of South Korea. Gageodo is five hours sailing from the port of Mokpo at the far southwest of the Korean Peninsula. While this seems a long way from a Korean perspective (very little these days is that many hours distant from somewhere else on the peninsula), the island used to be almost impossibly remote. During the Japanese colonial period, the authorities built a lighthouse as the only contribution of this period and did not leave policemen or a military garrison on the island. In 1968 when Professor Han Sangbok first visited it took five days by a series of different steamships to get to the island.73 Gageodo used to be extremely peripheral and was in common with Tong Shui Gou in the present beset by middlemen, known as Kaekchu (객주) in Korea. These credit holders reduced the developmental capability of the island substantially, maintaining it in an undeveloped state well into the latter half of the twentieth century.74 It is apparently only with the coming of mobile phone technology that Gageodo’s fishing people were able to invest as they chose. Government investment was slight until the 1970s and the fishermen still had to haul their boats up a pebble beach to rest at the side of the main village street. However, Gageodo today was found very different, vital strategically due to its proximity to the main Chinese shipping lanes huge amounts of public money have rebuilt the harbour infrastructure and reclaimed much of the land. The fishing community there appears vibrant, however it also is challenged by environmental changes. Stronger storms, more violent winds and extraordinarily in evidence during the visit of the author of this book, drought on an island in the middle of the sea that entailed Mokpo district authorities shipping bottled water to the fishermen as their tanks and wells had run dry. While Gageodo has become much more important and less peripheral to South Korea’s institutions and received a great deal in the way of infrastructural development and support which has transformed the communities capabilities and the geography of its harbour and coastline, the island is subject to some of the same complications as Tong Shui Gou.
North Korean fishing communities themselves are harder to reach and harder to do fieldwork in. This author has spent a number of occasions undertaking field trips to North Korea and some have been more successful than others. I often suggest to academics interested in visiting that nation that it is, in fact, easy to visit North Korea, if you have the right amount of money, but it is difficult for that visit to be anything more than simply a series of staged interactions with images and statues of Kim Il Sung and other key figures in the nation’s political hagiography. Readers might want to consider the work of Campbell (2015) on these circumstances.75 It is far harder to make a visit of empirical use to an academic and to extract functional and useful data from that visit. Such a visit requires connection and it requires complicated negotiation with internal organisations in North Korea, all of whom can say no at any point (because saying no in North Korea is much easier than saying yes, as nothing bad happens that an individual will be responsible for if they say no), or change any plan or field visit at any time. This means that field trips of academic value to North Korea are not impossible, but do require flexibility and a great deal of patience. I have made such trips to forestry and coastal reclamation projects in the past, and these trips were of empirical value, but they were not to natural or organic communities. Each was to an epistemic or technical or research community embedded in a wider framework of a developmental sector.
This book aimed to consider a particular community in the fishing sector of North Korea, Sindo (신도군), a small fishing cooperative formed in the 1970s from fishing communities elsewhere in North Korea. This community was vital and important once in North Korea’s developmental and political narratives, in the news, on the front cover of Rodong Sinmun, the national newspaper, and subject to a visit from Kim Il Sung. However, North Korea’s institutional gaze has a tendency to move on, and Sindo was soon forgotten, drifting down the list of developmental priorities, but as this is a North Korean community unable to repurpose itself or find a new geographic place. It was trapped on the semi-reclaimed marginal land at the mouth of the Amnok/Yalu river as it had always been up to and through the famine period of the 1990s and nearly up the present day. In recent years, the fishing infrastructures and desires of North Korea’s central government have picked up again, and fishing has been reorganised into the institutional frameworks of the Korean People’s Army. Fishing in North Korea was to be undertaken through a series of KPA Fisheries Stations and the boat and shipbuilding capacities of the nation, such as they are were to be deployed to support these stations. Previous cooperatives like Sindo were rather left out in the cold by this repurposing of the fishing sector, and this pressed hard on these communities and limited their ability to catch and supply their quotas for regional and local government further. Sindo, in particular, has been impacted in a different way by the environmental changes that have impacted fishing communities on the Liaodong Peninsula. Increased storm activity and sea-level rise has begun to impact on the reclaimed land on which the community is based as well as reducing the catch available and making fishing in the area more dangerous. Sindo, however, has been a difficult field site to engage with and to encounter, a fact that makes it no less central to not just the fieldwork of this book, but the analysis and conclusions that ultimately are made by the author.
Having given an account of the aims and objectives, outlooks, literature and methodologies as well as the field sites and field approach behind this book, I will briefly give an account of the remaining chapters following this introduction. In the Chap. 2, the book gives more details of the geographies and histories of fishing, fishing people and fish. As in a sense, this introduction has already hinted at, fish, fishing and fishing communities are under-researched in both historical and geographic sense. Even in the field of anthropology, an academic discipline with a concern for the edges and outliers in human development, fishing communities, their societies, traditions and histories have not received much in the way of exposure or interest. This chapter, therefore, outlines what can only be a partial and incomplete focus on the wider global histories and geographies of fish and fishing. The chapter also considers the methodologies, collection methods and theoretical frameworks behind those studies and research which exists. For the most part, histories and geographies of fish and fishing have been extremely focused on the northern hemisphere. Histories of European fishing development and stocks abound, especially those focused on the traditions of the Cod and Herring fisheries prior to the twentieth century, and to the area around Newfoundland’s Grand Banks. European fishing and its colonialist, modernist and capitalist technologies as they were deployed in the pursuit more globally of whales and seals are also quite abundant. Histories and geographies of fishing in the Pacific, Africa and South East Asia are few and far between, however those that are encountered within this chapter are considered for their methodologically approach to the study of fishing communities and territories outside of the traditions of European or Western fishing practice. Given the author of this book’s primary focus on the landscapes and spaces of the Korean Peninsula and in particular North Korean fish, fishing and fishing community histories and geographies of Chinese and Japanese fishing are of particular interest and transfers of technology, spiritual mythology and cultural tradition with those of Korea are vital to this chapter. Finally, this chapter explores the history of Korean fishing traditions and practices, considering what material exists from the records of the pre-1907 Chosŏn state, as well as the material gathered by Japanese academics and colonists during the period from 1907 to 1945. These are combined with the few but vital studies of Korean fishing communities in more recent times, including those of Gageodo.
Having outlined the theoretical background behind the notion of matter and matters as vibrant or lively already in this introduction, the Chap. 3 utilises the framework provided by Jane Bennett, Sarah Whatmore and others to more deeply explore what its deployment within the context of this book would mean. Contrasting recent work on the intersection between human form and matter and the bacterial and viral realm, an intersection which is inescapable for humans and has begun to suggest a meshing and merging of humanity’s apparently independent nature with other, unexpected forms of nature, the chapter considers the co-production of fishing communities and terrain by fish as much as by fishermen. The changing form and shape of fishing resource, as well as the individual and collective behaviours and strategies of fish, both in their normal efforts and energies to survive and in the particular efforts to escape the fishermen will be considered within the scope of this co-production. Fish and other creatures of the sea and of the seabed themselves, therefore, are held to be active, agential and energetic participant in the web of life which includes not only themselves, but the human communities who prey on and exploit them. Bennett and others have also extended their theorisation to include the mineral, non-sentient and non-living inhabitants of our world, and this chapter also includes the physicality of the infrastructures and technologies utilised by fishermen and fishing communities to ensnare, capture, track and coral their object species. The functionality of such materials, as well as their availability and development and the natural decay given the difficult terrain and elements provided by the sea can have an extraordinary impact on the relations between fish and fishermen, negating or increasing the agency and capabilities of both. Finally, and extending from that, the Chap. 3 considers knowledge, the development of knowledge, culture and tradition as vibrant, if ephemeral matters with a real impact on both fish and fishing human.
Chapter 4 focuses directly on North Korea. With the political theorisation surrounding the politics and ideology of Pyongyang outlined in this introduction in mind, the chapter explores the intersections between fish and fishing and the developmental agendas of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un. Tracing the focus on fishing and fishing resource and the connections and enmeshing with the different periods of North Korean political and industrial development, the chapter explores this periodisation and impacts on the lively matters of North Korean fish and fishing. This history and geography reach back to the pre-history of North Korea, examining the transformation of fishing and fishing infrastructures during the period of Korea’s opening up and the colonial period under Japanese occupation. Unlike Japanese fishing practices, traditional Korean fishing was focused on the shore and the near sea, Koreans did not historically venture out into the deep sea or the wider oceans. While Japanese colonialism developed Korean fishing practices in a more extensive and technological manner, North Korean fishing following the Liberation in 1945 was still technologically and infrastructurally challenged. This became worse following the Korean War of 1950–1953, and North Korea’s fishing practices and rights have since then been challenged by the post-War status quo of maritime demarcation, in particular the Northern Limit Line and more contemporary practices of sanctioning and restriction which are also produced by geopolitics.76 Pyongyang has, therefore, continually fought to extend its fishing reach, with seemingly little success, but fish and maritime resources have become much more important to North Korea following the crisis period of the early 1990s. Fish in recent North Korean history have become vital to the provision of food given the collapse in soil health and agricultural capacity and also once an important element of economic exchange given their non-sanctioned status until 2017. Following United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2371 in August of 2017, fish and maritime products have now been problematized as other North Korean matters and materials77 and this will also be considered by the chapter.
While North Korea may certainly be unusual in contemporary politics, an outlier when it comes to organisation of state, economy and society, the author of this book believes it is a mistake to consider it unique or sui generis. As this introduction has asserted North Korea its politics, development and no doubt lively matters cannot be separated from the wider streams of history, nor from the influence and connections with neighbouring nations. This is, of course, both true historically as much as it is true in the current era. While fishing practice and development as we will see in following chapter is certainly difficult in contemporary North Korea and specific communities under Pyongyang’s rule, communities and fishing geographies nearby to North Korea are themselves also beset by difficulties and challenges, of both environmental and political natures. It is important, therefore, for this book to engage with lively fishing matters and materials in these neighbouring or connected nations. Chapter 5 engages in particular with three case studies, which the author of this book has completed fieldwork exercises in during the period of this book’s production. First, the chapter journeys to the island of Gageodo, the most southwestern island in South Korea and the closest South Korean community to China. As has been introduced in this introductory chapter, Gageodo’s fishing community has always been challenged by its geographic isolation and distance from the political institutions of Korea, whether contemporary South Korea, historical Chosŏn or colonial Chosen. Its community, however, has continued to fish, in spite of this isolation, the co-option of their efforts historically by tradition Kaekchu middlemen, and the pressure of tourist development (Gageodo is now very famous for sport fishing) in current times. Similarly pressured are the fishing communities nearby Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula in China, just to the northwest of North Korea. Dalian city is subject to spectacular levels of speculative urbanism and attendant levels of pollution and environmental degradation. Whole areas of the city and its surrounding rural hinterland have been captured by the forces of new capital and speculation and reconstructed in such a way as to exclude less profitable and more old-fashioned enterprises as fishing. However, fishing communities continue to exist, as well as fish, reconfiguring their fishing geographies and infrastructures to take into account the new economic and social realities of twenty-first-century China. In these local case studies, a complex meshing of lively political, environmental and economic mattes generate and co-produce fishing geographies and landscapes which will certainly be useful in the following chapters’ consideration of a particular North Korean fishing community.
Chapter 6 of this book focuses on Sindo island, which is in the mouth of the Amnok (Yalu in Chinese) River at the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Reclaimed from the estuary of the river in 1971 a cooperative of fisherpeople from older fishing communities and enterprises along the western coast of North Korea was created to serve as a model community and model example of development at this time. Kim Il Sung himself made repeated visits between 1971 and 1976, during a period when North Korean politics sought to reconfigure landscape and developmental possibility through a series of what are called ‘Great Nature Remaking Projects.’ North Korea’s fishing industry was to be reconfigured so as to focus on resources further out to sea, fishing practice and knowledge was to be further developed and a series of cooperatives were to be the institutional basis for the sector. By the 1990s fishing cooperatives such as Sindo had been forgotten in the collapse of North Korean capability and bureaucracy and in the 2000’s the fishing industry has been co-opted by the Korean Peoples’ Army and a network of fishery stations dedicated to industrial fishing and resource production built. This meant that Sindo became even more peripheral to the political and institutional mind. This chapter considers the strategies the fisherpeople of Sindo use or do not use to maintain their livelihoods and connections to the vibrant and lively fishing matters that once sustained and gave impetus to them. Are these strategies informal life politics, or other forms of engagement with the wider web of maritime life? Furthermore, in light of North Korea’s accumulation of conservational paradigms of management during the 1990s and early 2000s, even in the maritime or aquacultural world, this chapter explores the relation between Pyongyang’s politics and the reality of fishing and maritime ecosystems. In Sindo and in other places within North Korea are fishing matters as vibrant and energetic as local political sensibility and aspiration are lively.
Having encountered the vibrant matters of fishing communities close to North Korea, as well as the reality of fishing and fishing life in North Korea at Sindo, framed by the histories and geographies of fishing landscapes throughout East Asia and beyond this Chap. 7 final draws this book to a lively conclusion. Fish and Fishing for North Korea have become vitally important again in current years, important in both abundance and absence. North Korea has this in common with much of the world’s fishing terrain, precarious resources familiar in global histories of fishing such as those of the collapse of Newfoundland and the Grand Banks cod fishery, the disappearance of the herring from Southwest England and the depletion of much of Africa’s fishing stock in recent years. As climate change, ocean temperature and acidification and a number of other elements of global environmental crisis develop, fish and fishing will become still precarious. Fish themselves may be energetic and vibrant materials but that will not stop them becoming another element of the impending and ongoing global extinction event of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. That does not, however, mean that fish and fishing terrains will lose their agency or the impact upon human life and developmental practice. On the contrary fish and maritime resources in their absence could become even more vibrant, their diminution in the web of life of the sea and land making them more powerful and valuable as they become more scarce. Scarcity and absence, of course, are common in the life and practice of North Korea, and this chapter and book conclude with a discussion of the role of these themes at their connection with the realm of fish and fishing. The chapter also includes discussion of a particular outcome of North Korean developmental policy and the pressures of extraction as they apply to local communities, an outcome of the most macabre and unexpected kind. The informal life politics expressed in the actions and interactions of fishing communities in North Korea are very much concerned it seems with the navigation of landscapes and terrains of lack, scarcity and difficulty. Their webs of life, however, do not diminish in liveliness with these restrictions, but through the blended and distributed agency perhaps familiar to Bennett, Whatmore and fishing communities nearby such as at Dalian maintain their energy and vibrancy.
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