Japan: eight bodies found in boat washed up on beach
According to the Japan Coast Guard, it is possible that the washed up bodies, which were partly reduced to skeletons, were from North Korea
Eight bodies, which have been reduced partly to skeletons, were found on Monday in a small ship, that washed up on a beach in Japan, said the Japan Coast Guard (JCG).
The ship washed up ashore on a beach about 70km north of a marina, where last week police found eight men who said they were from North Korea.
A Japanese resident spotted the 22-foot wooden boat Friday floating in Miyazawa Beach in Oga, Akita Prefecture, along the Sea of Japan, according to Japan times.
Officials searched the vessel Sunday and Monday and found several of the remains were “skeletonized,” indicating a long period had elapsed before it washed ashore.
The remains were so severely decomposed it was hard to decipher if they were men or women. The 68-year-old woman who initially spotted the vessel said she saw rescue workers carrying skeletal remains using stretchers.
"I was surprised to see the boat in such a bad condition," the woman told the Japanese news site.
The discovery puzzled Japanese officials, who found no clues that indicated the ship’s origin. The Coast Guard said the boat may have come from North Korea, according to Kyodo News.
Police claimed that they appeared to be fishermen, whose boat , which was found nearby had run into some trouble.
According to the JCG, they were working to establish the nationalities of the eight bodies which were found.
The bodies of two males, which were found over the weekend on the western shore of the Sea of Japan island of Sado, were also similarly skeletonised.
Though the nationalities of the two males have not yet been established, what appeared to be a North Korean brand of cigarettes and life jackets with Korean lettering on them were close by, said the JCG’s Sado station.
Both the JCG and local police said that they may have been from the North.
Such incidents come at a time of increasing tension over Pyongyang’s nuclear arms and missile programs, after US president Donald Trump designated the North as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, thus allowing the US to apply further sanctions.
According to experts, North Korea’s food shortages could be behind what is potentially a series of accidents involving North Korean vessels.
“North Korea pushes so hard for its people to gather more fish so that they can make up their food shortages,” said research manager of North Korean Studies Institution, Seo Yu-suk.
Small and old North Korean vessels that sail beyond coastal waters are particularly vulnerable to bad weather conditions, he said.
Professor at Japan’s Tokai University, Yoshihiko Yamada, said that fishermen operating in the Sea of Japan currently, have entered a season of volatile weather.
“During the summer, the Sea of Japan is quite calm but it starts to get choppy when November comes. It gets dangerous when northwesterly winds start to blow,” he said.
No less than 43 wooden ships, which were believed to have come from Pyongyang have washed up on Japanese shores, or were seen to be drifting off Japan’s coast from January to 22 November this year, compared with 66 ships for the whole of 2016, said the JCG.
