Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Neighbours by Robert Winstanley-Chesters

Author:Robert Winstanley-Chesters
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9789811500428
Publisher: Springer Singapore

4.1 A New Basis for Fishing

From the earliest years of Pyongyang’s institutional and infrastructural development following the end of the Japanese colonial period, fishing, maritime development and access to the sea have been a key thematic element of that development. Just as in other sectors, this development can be periodized to form a more coherent historiography. Readers might suggest that in part this is not related to North Korea’s revolutionary political ideology or sense of itself as a beacon for other politically unconventional states, but something far more conventional. The Japanese Empire , United States, the United Kingdom and other completely unrevolutionary polities, in North Korea’s opinion, had simply by 1948 established some of the prerequisites for functional governmentality in modernity. One element of this was to have the capability to take to the deep seas and to become a global fishing nation. North Korea’s ideological and national nemesis, Imperial Japan, had even between 1910 and 1945 done this across the Pacific and from the shores of the Korean Peninsula. If North Korea, therefore, was to ever assert a claim to political authority and legitimacy from the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, to one of the things it would have to be capable of as a nation was fishing and fishing not just around the coasts, but in the deeper waters of global oceans. As readers will have gathered, this was made all the more difficult by the removal of much of the fishing fleet by retreating Japanese institutions in 1945 and by the degradation of whatever was left between 1950 and 1953.25 However, just because recent history and circumstance put Pyongyang at a disadvantage in this field of development, did not mean that North Korea wasn’t determined to aim to secure its place as a global fishing powerhouse.

A peculiarity, familiar to those who watch, study and analyse North Korean matters, of North Korean historical narrative on developmental matters is for contemporary interests and focus on a particular theme or issue to be read or rewritten back into historical narratives from much earlier temporal frames.26 Thus, the very first text which addresses the interest of political leaders of North Korea in fishing and maritime matters, actually references projects, intention and desire from long before the moment it was written.

Kim Il Sung apparently authored ‘On Developing the Fishing Industry on a New Basis ’ and presented it to the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party on 8 July 1948. Some 3 years from Liberation and the formative process for the nation, in the text the reader can still discern the tensions of postcolonial issues during North Korea’s early years.

‘Seabound on three sides, our country is very rich in marine resources. The fishing industry is a major component of our national economy and plays an important role in improving the people’s living standards.’27

While Kim Il Sung’s assertions of fishing’s importance to national development, will become familiar to the reader, the texts’ distinct temporal context is clear. One of Kim Il

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