Karl Haushofer, the German geo-politician, in his Geopolitik des Pazifischen Ozeans declared that the Pacific would be the scene of the next great turning point in history. This conclusion may be arguable, but there are those who are convinced that the northwest Pacific today is the backdrop to a new form of Soviet expansionism, which in historical perspective might fulfill Haushofer’s prophecy. Haushofer did not indicate that fisheries would be the factor causing maritime boundary disputes, creating political instability within and among States, and leading to a rapid change in national power distribution in the Pacific. But that is the role being taken by the northwest Pacific fisheries today.
Habitual failures in agricultural production have forced the Soviet Union to turn to the high seas as a source for needed protein. The increase noted in fish consumption during the past few years in the U.S.S.R. is significant. Pravda reported an increase of eighteen per cent in 1954 over 1953 consumption alone. The U.S.S.R. reported a catch in 1955 of fish, marine animals, and whales amounting to 2,740,000 metric tons. This was more than double the catch reported for 1946, the first year of the postwar period, and 195 per cent of the 1940 catch. Yet the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was called in February 1956, concluded that this increase must be accelerated. The Party Congress directed the fishing industry to produce 4,200,000 tons in 1960.
How is this goal to be achieved? By deep- sea fishing, the Soviets tell us. As early as 1954, Pravda was drumming up support for expanding deep-sea fishing activities. A. Okukhov in a Pravda article dedicated to the problems of the U.S.S.R. fish industry concluded that the answer to insufficient fish production was “to master new fishing regions and to improve fishing explorations.” As a result, trawlers of the Murmansk Herring Administration and the Baltic State Fishing Trust, which had operated in the North Atlantic prior to 1955, were joined in the latter year by vessels of five additional fishing organizations. The reported herring catch in the North Atlantic in 1955 jumped to 14.5 times the 1950 take.
It was in the Far East, however, that the Soviets placed their greatest hopes. The Far East fishing administrations, which consistently under-fulfilled their assigned plans prior to 1955, reported jubilantly at the end of the first year of the new directive that “the most important condition for the great increase of fish catches was the fact that enterprises of the fish industry . . . are successfully mastering fishing in open seas. . . .” It was stressed that the 700,000 tons of fish procured in the Far East during 1956 equalled in protein value nine million head of cattle. More over, it was emphasized that of the total fish and other marine products procured by the U.S.S.R. in 1956, the following amounts were obtained in the Far East: 85 per cent of the salmon, 71 per cent of the cetacean, 100 per cent of crab, 65 per cent of mollusks, 30 per cent of herring, and 96 per cent of seaweed. In the Far East, the 1957 production achieved well over 1,000,000 tons of maritime products, or more than 25 per cent of the total U.S.S.R. planned production in that year, whereas in 1945 the take had amounted to only one twentieth of the total Soviet production.
Deep-sea fishing requires expensive and complicated equipment and well organized fishing techniques. Larger, better-equipped trawlers are needed, such as the refrigerator trawlers recently introduced into the Murmansk trawler fleet. Extensive navigation equipment and methods of communication are required for accurate navigation during prolonged periods at sea. Sonar apparatus is needed to locate and follow schools of fish. New skills in fishing reconnaissance must need be developed. Additional floating processing bases to handle fish at sea are required. Improved receiving bases on shore are needed to process an increased catch. Extensive retraining of crews and processing personnel is necessary to carry out the new plans. All of these things, the Soviets say, are being done.
The Soviets, however, have in international opposition a more important problem with which to cope. In the Baltic and North Atlantic there is bound to be friction, for these are the traditional fisheries of the Baltic States, of Germany, and other Europeans. In the Far East—the Sea of Japan, the Okhotsk Sea, and the Northwest Pacific—Soviet maritime expansion is encompassing the richest prewar and postwar fishing grounds of Japan, a fish-eating nation whose very existence depends on a continued annual fish catch in these seas.
The fishing industry of Japan, which in the Golden Era of the late 1930’s accounted for one third of the world’s catch, suffered a severe repression during World War II. The northern seas were the most important to the maritime industry, bringing to Japan an equivalent of fifty billion yen annually in terms of the 1957 rate. But by 1952 the Japanese fishing industry had recovered its pre-war vitality, and fishing operations once more were expanding into the seas north of the four main Japanese islands. The Japanese Peace Treaty, which was signed in San Francisco on 8 September 1951, met the ratification qualifications and became effective on 27 April 1952. Japan became sovereign, and the occupation restrictions were removed. Immediately, Japanese fishing fleets penetrated into the Sea of Japan, the Okhotsk, the Aleutian, and West Kamchatkan waters.
The Japanese postwar fishing activities in these areas assumed a character somewhat different from the prewar operations. The loss of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to the Soviets under the terms of the Yalta Agreement decreased Japan’s coastline in the northern areas by 1,540 miles. Hundreds of fishing ports, anchorages, and bases were lost to the Soviet Union at the wartime Yalta meeting of the Big Three. At the end of the war the Japanese fishermen of these islands were expelled by the Soviet Union, the majority seeking refuge in Hokkaido. Thus, when postwar fishing operations began once more in 1952, the deep-sea fishing fleets no longer had bases in the northern areas. Consequently they were accompanied by floating processing bases known as “mother-ships.” In 1952 and 1953 three fleets led by mother-ships ventured into the Aleutian waters, and contributed significantly to the 1953 Japanese record catch of 1,165,290 tons of maritime products. Seven fleets operated in the Aleutian waters in 1954, and in 1955 twelve salmon fleets were despatched to the Aleutian waters and two to the Okhotsk. A catch of 64,000,000 salmon alone was reported for that year. In addition, three crabbing fleets were organized —two penetrating into the Okhotsk and one to Bristol Bay. Two whaling fleets sent to the area reported successful catches. Thus, by the beginning of 1956, Japan was well on the way to full exploitation of her prewar fisheries in the northern seas.
The maritime interests of Japan and the U.S.S.R. in the Okhotsk, Sea of Japan, and northwest Pacific were bound to clash. Both planned large scale exploitation of the same fisheries. Though the Soviets have consistently throughout the postwar period captured and interned Japanese fishing boats and their crews, the normal procedure until 1956 was to charge Japanese fishermen with unauthorized violation of the Soviet 12-mile maritime belt claimed as territorial waters. However, on 10 February 1956, while the 20th Communist Party Congress was in session in Moscow, the Japanese received an indication of new action to come. Japanese newspapers reported Moscow radio accusations against Japanese “rapacious fishing” in the Far East. On 15 February, Moscow radio apparently once more accused “a large Japanese fishing firm ... of intercepting salmon on their way to Soviet rivers to spawn.” On 22 March Japanese newspaper headlines virtually screamed protest to a Moscow radio-announced decision of the Soviet Council of Ministers. A large area of the northwest Pacific and Okhotsk Sea was unilaterally closed to foreign fishing with the exception that during the 1956 season fishing by foreigners would be allowed but limited.
The international reactions to the Soviet unilateral decision were instantaneous and widespread. Japanese fishermen were caught in the midst of preparing nineteen fleets for the 1956 fishing season. Canadian and American fishermen feared that the Japanese, if forcibly restricted from the area designated by the Soviets, would be driven east of the 175th meridian, the eastern limit for Japanese fishing activities under the terms of the Japan- United States-Canada Fisheries Treaty of 1952. But the momentum of preparing nineteen fishing fleets, 588 survey ships, and 200 transport craft could not be halted. On 1 April over 100 trawlers exited Hokkaido for the fishing grounds of the central and southern Kurile Islands. On 3 April thirteen Japanese crabbing boats left for western Kamchatka waters. Two crabbing fleets left the port of Hakodate on 10 April and twenty boats sailed for Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea. It was clear that Moscow’s threat of force was not sufficient to stay the Japanese fleets.
But it was clear that Japan, especially the fishing circles having the greatest interest in the restricted areas, felt uneasy and uncertain as to what forcible measures the Soviets might employ in sustaining their unilateral action. Though the Soviet pronouncement had dealt primarily with salmon and ocean trout, from 15 March through 29 March the Soviets captured eight Japanese crabbing boats, a sizeable portion of the king-crab fishing fleet operating in Hokkaido-Southern Kurile waters. Japan, which was still technically at war with the Soviet Union, protested the Soviet action in a note to Moscow, denied the charges of illegal and rapacious fishing, and proposed negotiations on the fisheries problems. To this proposal the Soviets promptly agreed, and subsequently extensive talks were conducted in Moscow.
Only an informal agreement resulted in 1956, in which the chief Japanese negotiator Agriculture-Forestry Minister Kono accepted the limit set by the U.S.S.R. Again in 1957 negotiations resulted in a patch-work agreement terminating at the end of the 1957 fishing season. A Japanese editorial appearing in the Japan Times upon the conclusion of the 1957 agreement pointedly asked: “What about next year’s fishing season? And the next? The present agreement is only for 1957. And that is by no means the worst of it. Its terms imply that Japan will forever be in the position of a mendicant, subject to the Kremlin’s political disposition for her livelihood.” But the future, at least in the eyes of the Soviets, was clear. The Soviet negotiators came to the 1957 Tokyo meeting armed with stock phrases such as: “The 1957 agreement is an exceptional measure”; “The 1957 quota shall not be a precedent”; and “It is a Soviet concession to permit—for this year only— fishing in the Sea of Okhotsk.” V. N. Dourdenevski and S. B. Krylov, authors of a recent Soviet book on international law, have contrived the legal fiction that the Okhotsk Sea is really Soviet internal waters and thus legally subject to the sovereignty of the Soviet Union.
In addition to claims in the Okhotsk Sea and the northwest Pacific, more recent unilateral action by the Soviet Union closed off Peter the Great Bay and the approaches to Vladivostok to international usage. The Department of State in an official United States protest on 7 March 1958, decried this arbitrary act as “violative of the fundamental principles of international law.”
To accomplish the task set forth at the 20th Communist Party Congress to expand Soviet deep-sea fishing operations, a complete change in philosophy in Soviet fishing practices was necessitated and anticipated. But more important, a revolution in Soviet maritime expansion policies was demanded. Consistent with Communist revolutionary philosophy, this revolution has utilized all of the time-proven instruments—political, economic, legal and military—to attain the objectives set by the master plan laid down in Moscow. A Tass announcement on 22 April 1958 declared that the Soviet-Japanese fisheries agreement signed the previous day in Moscow by representatives of both countries stipulated that the Japanese would suspend fishing operations in the Okhotsk Sea as of 1 January 1959. The first step of Soviet expansion into the Pacific has been completed—crowned with success. Whither the next step?