They are old and battered small wooden ships and they keep washing up on Japan's coastline. Authorities are uncertain where they are coming from and the dead bodies and skeletons discovered on the ships aren't saying.
They are eerie and empty and no one knows where they are coming from. The Japanese are calling them “ghost ships” and they keep washing up on Japan’s coastlines. They are old and battered and there is no one on board save skeletons and decaying bodies of people who were once passengers.
There are a few clues here and there about the ships as some of the deteriorating cargo tends to tell a tale or two, according to The Washington Post. Some cargo found aboard the ships included tattered and ripped fishing nets and a sign or two written in Korean. Other than that, Japanese authorities have no idea what happened to these boats or where they have actually come from.
Since October at least a dozen of these “ghost ships” have washed ashore all over the Japanese coastline. While there have been skeletons and a few dead bodies recovered, there remains only speculation. The boats are rather primitive in form as if crude fishing vessels from South or North Korea whose crew met untimely deaths in a storm. Or, other speculate, maybe they escaped from North Korea and were trying to defect to Japan but met with tragedy.
The Japanese authorities have decided to work with the theory that the boats belonged to Korean fishermen. One academic at Temple University’s Center for Asian Studies has remarked that the North Korean dictatorship has been brutally imposing huge quotas on their farmers and fishermen. The school teacher speculates that these were just fishermen who stayed out too long, strayed too far from their own waters, and ran out of fuel.
The boats are around 30-35 feet in length and have no sign of any sophisticated equipment such as Global Positioning Systems. The bodies that are being discovered are so decomposed and deteriorated that no real formal cause of death can be accurately determined. In November, a boat found contained six human skulls and only one dead body. The head was attached, but just barely.
This is hardly an unusual occurrence in Japan as the “ghost ships” happen ashore somewhat regularly. There have been 34 of them recovered this year. They had 65 land last year and 80 of them washed ashore in 2013.
