[dp0622]

Wow. Thanks for the info. Yeah, there’s no love lost between some of those countries and China, right? So I suppose they would send them to S Korea.

N Korea to Japan in a not so great boat is a long trip, no?

[TigerLikesRooster]

Yes, I suspect that there were cases where they did escape but died while sailing toward Japan. Old boats with navigational and engine problems could fail and they were stranded in sea, met their death, but we never heard about them.

[erlayman]

There have been Japanese press reports of dozens of wooden boats from North Korea showing up on the West coast of Japan in the last couple years, most of the corpses appear to have been dead at least two or three months. Normally too cold and stormy a sea route for defectors. So the most likely theory that the military has been sending soldiers out onto the sea to fish but without training they quickly get lost or run into severe weather. Very unfortunate that a focus of the world on nukes and rockets too often overlooks an ongoing human tragedy.