Forbidden Waters

In the open waters of the Northern Pacific seas, the huge salmon were beginning an instinctive journey westward toward their spawning grounds in the rushing rivers of Kamchatka, Sakhalin and Siberia's eastern shores. Always before they had been met by thousands of Japanese fishing boats, which plucked almost all of Japan's important salmon catch from the northern waters. But this year the salmon move unmolested, and the sea is free of boats. Back in the fishing villages of Hokkaido, the Japanese vessels wait idly, their crews staring balefully out to sea. The gay festival that was to precede the departure for the fishing grounds has been canceled.

Five weeks ago, angered at the Japanese for breaking off peace treaty talks in London, the U.S.S.R. imposed severe controls on Japanese salmon fishing in the Okhotsk Sea, the western Bering Sea and parts of the North Pacific (see map) during the four-month spawning season. The prohibition put a merciless squeeze on Japan's fishing industry, which provides Japan's basic food supply. Aggressive Japanese fishermen once ranged the whole Pacific at will, but Japan now finds herself hemmed in by restricted areas.

In the Sea of Japan (rich in sardine, mackerel and flatfishes), an arbitrary "Rhee line" imposed by Japanese-hating Syngman Rhee keeps Japanese fishermen at least 60 miles away from the Korean coast. Southwest in the East China Sea, the Far East's best trawling grounds, the Japanese may not come within 100 miles of the Communist China coast. The coastal waters of North America, once a plentiful source of salmon and halibut, are now closed to Japan by a U.S. Canadian agreement that occupied Japan was persuaded to sign. And in the vast mid-Pacific tuna and bonito grounds, the U.S. has posted a 421,500-sq.-mi. nuclear testing area, which jittery Japanese fishermen have given a wide berth since radioactive ash fell on the Fortunate Dragon.

The Russians have been waging an unofficial fishing war against Japan since World War II, seizing hundreds of ships and imprisoning 3,796 men. This week a 17-man Japanese delegation led by shrewd, ambitious Agriculture and Forestry Minister Ichiro Kono arrived in Moscow to try to get the Russians to lift their latest restriction. Confidently Kono talked of a settlement in ten days. But unless he is prepared to make major political concessions, the hard-bargaining Russians are apt to drag out negotiations until the salmon are safely in their rivers and hundreds of Japanese fishermen are ruined.

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