Constructing the Northern Sea (Hokuyo): Rhetoric of Fishery Problems in Japan of the 1920s and 1930s.

What is the Northern Sea (Hokuyo in Japanese) for the Japanese people? The question is how the Japanese people had narrated the Northern Sea fishery. We make an analysis of the rhetorical idioms in discourses on the Northern Sea fishery, making use of the articles in several Japanese fishery journals and Japanese fishery cooperatives’ history on the Northern Sea fishery from the late 1920s to the early 1930s as the source texts.We classify rhetorical idioms into two: rhetorical idioms for “justification” and rhetorical idioms for“ accusation.” Idioms for justification connote a responsibility for the contemporary Japanese towards the past Japanese, claiming legitimacy in history, whereas idioms for accusation imply the existence of a special nation-to-nation relationship. The idioms soon spread as linguistic resources by political campaigns for defense of“ the Northern Sea fishery” in the early 1930s.We study the structure of the Northern Sea fishery narrative. Narratives on the 1930s’ Northern Sea fishery share the same plot-development with narratives on the Northern Sea fishery prior to 1905. We regard this development as the structure, specific to the Northern Sea fishery Narrative