Troubled Waters
On 29 December 2019, police in Japan’s Sado Island found the remains of at least five people, including two severed heads, in a wooden boat that had washed ashore. It was the second “ghost boat”—as battered wooden vessels containing the corpses of North Korean fishermen are popularly known in Japan—to wash up at Sado that month. Across the country, over a hundred and fifty ghost boats were found in 2019 alone, and there have been more than five hundred of them in the past five years. The Japanese coast guard stated that it had found over fifty bodies in such vessels last year.
Encrusted with shells and algae, these flat-bottomed boats are typically around five metres in length. They have no toilets or beds, and typically contain just a few jugs of drinking water, fishing nets and tackle. They fly tattered North Korean
