If you say sardines to a lot of people now, you won’t feel that familiar It is natural that sardines have long disappeared from the table of Koreans
However, until the 1930s, sardines were commonly caught in the waters of the Korean Peninsula
In particular, the number of sardines that suddenly appeared in the East Sea of the Korean Peninsula from 1923 was half the sea water and half the sardines were in the East Sea, and there were even so many sardines that it looked like an island and sank
Japanese imperialism, which ruled Joseon, caught the eye of this abundant sardines
Originally, since the 8th century A.D., the Japanese have kept a ban on meat-free eating of cattle, pigs, and chickens according to Buddhist teachings, so they have been living by supplementing their lack of protein with seafood caught in the sea Among them, sardines were foods that contained protein on the Japanese table instead of meat
However, after a long period of catching sardines, by the early 1900s, the number of sardines had decreased so much that they could hardly be found in the Japanese sea
Meanwhile, in 1923, when news broke that a huge number of sardines had appeared in the East Sea of colonial Joseon, Japanese fishermen rushed to the East Sea and caught them recklessly It is said that one Japanese fishing boat caught as many as 2,000 to at least 700 sardines a day
The reason why Japanese fishermen caught so many sardines was not just to use them as ingredients The sardines were oily fish, and the oil that was squeezed and refined from the sardines went into making various useful things like gunpowder, glycerin, fertilizer, cosmetics, margarine, soap, and candles
So since about 1900, in Japan, sardine oil has been called warm oil and used as industrial oil About 90 percent of the fish oil produced in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s was sardine oil
Especially sardine oil was very useful to the Japanese Until the 1930s, 80 of Japan’s oil was imported from the United States, but when Japan invaded China from 1937 and started the Sino-Japanese War, the U.S. government said, “All the capital invested in China by the United States was destroyed by Japan invading China So Japan should withdraw from China.”
However, Japan’s influential military rejected U.S. pressure, and as the U.S. tried to regulate oil exports to Japan, the Japanese military believed it should not rely on the U.S. to continue the war Meanwhile, the Japanese military noted that refining the oil of sardines caught in the East Sea of Joseon could replace the oil used by the Japanese military
In particular, in 1935, the amount of sardine oil produced in Joseon reached 100,000 tons, and the optimistic outlook was that it would not have to rely on U.S. imported oil So in 1940, as the Japanese go into the Pacific War, roughly half of the total oil used by the Japanese was going to be sardine oil
By 1939, the annual catch of sardines in the East Sea had reached 1.2 million tons, but by 1940, it had suddenly dropped to 900,000 tons And a year later, in 1941, it was 630,000 tons, and the next year, in 1942, it was 2,500 tons, which is a 250th percent drop Even by 1943, a herd of sardines disappeared in the East Sea
In response to this phenomenon, the Japanese Government-General of Korea claimed, “The ocean current in the sea changed, so the sardines no longer came to the East Sea,” but wouldn’t it be appropriate to interpret that the overfishing of Japanese fishermen dried up and naturally stopped catching sardines
In fact, during the Japanese colonial period, Japanese fishermen used to catch fish stocks in the East Sea and dry their seeds several times As a result, ghost whales, which were originally called the “sea of whales,” and river fish distributed on Dokdo Island, were also caught up in overfishing by Japanese fishermen and became extinct So it’s not unreasonable to say that sardines have also disappeared due to overfishing by Japanese fishermen
Thus, since 1943, when a group of sardines disappeared, the Japanese Government-General of Korea ordered fishermen who had been active in the seas of Joseon to stop catching sardines The reason was that fishing boats should not use precious oil as fuel to find sardines that could not be caught in a situation where the amount of oil they had stockpiled in Japan ahead of the war with the U.S Even if it was not ordered by the Governor-General of Korea, sardines that had already disappeared in the East Sea of Joseon could no longer be caught
On December 7, 1941, you have the Japanese Navy’s raid on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the United States cut off all of its oil exports to Japan, and at that time the amount of oil left in Japan was three and a half years’ worth
And since 1945 Japan has been suffering from a shortage of oil that even warships are reluctant to go out to sea, and eventually surrendered to the United States on August 15 of that year
It is said that in Joseon, sardines were called ‘Ilhammer’ because they were the fish that ruined Japan