Tokyo - Eight bodies, which had been
reduced partly to skeletons, were found on Monday in a small
wooden ship that washed up on a beach in the sea of Japan, the
Japan Coast Guard (JCG) said.
The ship came ashore on a beach 70 km (44 miles) north of a
marina where police last week found eight men who said they were
from North Korea. Police said they appeared to be fishermen
whose boat, found nearby, had run into trouble.
The JCG said they were working to establish the
nationalities of the eight bodies on the ship.
The bodies of two males, similarly partly skeletonised, were
also found at the weekend on the western shore of the Sea of
Japan island of Sado.
Although the nationalities of these two have not yet been
established, what appeared to be North Korean cigarettes and
life jackets with Korean lettering on them were nearby, the
JCG's Sado station said.
Both local police and the JCG said the two may have been
from North Korea.
The incidents come at a time of rising tension over North
Korea's nuclear arms and missile programmes after President
Donald Trump redesignated the isolated nation a state sponsor of
terrorism, allowing the United States to levy further sanctions.
Experts say North Korea's food shortages could be behind
what is potentially a series of accidents involving North Korean
ships.
"North Korea pushes so hard for its people to gather more
fish so that they can make up their food shortages," said Seo
Yu-suk, research manager of North Korean Studies Institution in
Seoul.
Small and old North Korean ships that sail beyond its
coastal waters are vulnerable to bad weather, he said.
Yoshihiko Yamada, professor at Japan's Tokai University,
said fishermen operating in the Sea of Japan have just entered a
season of hostile weather conditions.
"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.
A total of 43 wooden ships that were believed to have come
from the Korean peninsula washed up on Japanese shores or were
seen to be drifting off Japan's coast from January to November 22
this year, compared with 66 ships for the whole of last year,
the JCG said.