In 2020 Chinese “dark fleets” replaced North Korean “ghost ships” in international discourse as symbolic of a certain form of global maritime threat and disturbance. This article takes a longer view of trouble on the high seas, looking back to the globalization of the oceanic commons at the behest of post 1945 geopolitics and new forms and methodologies of fisheries science. With Carmel Finley's articulation of Pacific Empires of Fishing in mind the article explores fishing histories of East Asia and the Pacific, both during and after the era of colonization The article considers the marginalization of already peripheral traditional Korean fishing communities by Japanese colonization, ecological collapse generated by the technological and statistical development underpinning scientific fishing, and the ghosts made of fish themselves as the powers and logics of accumulation and extraction transform the watery geographies of the Pacific.

Founded in 1897 as a semi-official government organ by Zumoto Motosada with the support of Itō Hirobumi and Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Japan Times played an essential role, as the first English-language newspaper to be edited by Japanese, in shaping Western understandings of Japan and Japanese modernisation in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The Japan Times framed Japanese ‘modernisation’ in the language of Western civilisation, thus facilitating Japan's rapprochement with the Western Powers (particularly with Great Britain) in the late 19th century by presenting Japan as a ‘civilised’ (i.e., Western) nation-state. The paper played an equally important role in manipulating Western public discourses in favour of Japan's expansionist ambitions in Asia by framing justifications for Japanese foreign policy in concepts of Western civilisation.