Following are excerpts from an article by Gavan McCormack under the headline "Small Islands – Big Problem: Senkaku/Diaoyu and the Weight of History and Geography in China-Japan Relations" at http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3464 (Begin excerpts) .....Following the seizure of the Chinese trawler and the arrest of captain Zhan, the Japanese government stated its position: there was “no room for doubt” that the islands were an integral part of Japanese territory: (wagakuni no koyu no ryodo), there was no territorial dispute or diplomatic issue, and captain Zhan was simply being investigated for breaches of Japanese law. Yet plainly there was doubt. China (both the People’s Republic and the Republic, or Taiwan) disputes the Japanese claim to sovereignty. The US, which occupied the islands between 1945 and 1972, was carefully agnostic about their sovereignty when returning to Japan “administrative rights” over them, and it has reiterated that stance on many subsequent occasions. As re-stated in the context of the 2010 clash, the US position is that sovereignty is something to be settled between the claimant parties. Furthermore, while Japan has exercised “administrative rights” and thus effective control since 1972, it has blocked all activities on the islands, by its own or other nationals, thereby acting as if sovereignty was indeed contested. Thus, with two Chinese governments denying it, and the US refusing to endorse it, it is surely whistling in the wind for Japan to insist there is “no dispute” over ownership. Whoever initiated them, the clashes of that day raised a large question-mark over the islands..... From the 14th century, Chinese documents record and name the islands as important reference points on the ancient maritime trading route between coastal China (Foochow) and Okinawa. The designated route for tribute missions between the Ryukyu kingdom and the Chinese court during the Ming and Qing dynasties lay via these small islands. The Japanese geographer, Hayashi Shihei, follows the Chinese convention, including the islands, with their Chinese names, as Chinese territory, in his 1785 map. The near universal conviction in Japan with which the islands today are declared an “integral part of Japan’s territory” is remarkable for its disingenuousness. These are islands unknown in Japan till the late 19th century (when they were identified from British naval references), not declared Japanese till 1895, not named till 1900, and that name not revealed publicly until 1950. The determination in 2010 not to yield one inch on the Senkaku issue may have owed something to the nagging fear that China’s claim, if admitted on Senkaku, might quickly extend to Okinawa. Japan’s claim to the Senkakus followed shortly after it had established its claim over Okinawa by detaching the Ryukyu kingdom, tied to the court in Beijing by a four century-long “tribute” relationship, from its place in the tribute order. The despatch of a Japanese naval expedition to Taiwan in 1874 to “protest” the killing of Ryukyuan (Miyako Island) fishermen, passing without effective protest from China, was taken by Japanese leaders to signal for international law purposes that China acquiesced in Japan’s claims. It was followed, in 1879, by extinction of the kingdom and Okinawa’s incorporation as a Japanese prefecture. The years of the rise of the modern Japanese state were the years of crisis and decline for the Chinese imperial state, when the country was subject to imperialist encroachment, catastrophic wars and internal rebellions. The revolutionary modern Japanese state, founded in 1868, exploited China’s weakness and its multifaceted crises to join the ranks of imperialists, expanding at imperial China’s cost, by wresting from it first the Ryukyu Islands, then Taiwan and the Senkakus, then Northeast China, till eventually it plunged the region into full-scale war. On the largest island of the Senkaku group, a Japanese businessman began to make a living from 1884, collecting albatross feathers and tortoise shells. However, his requests to the government in Tokyo for a formal leasehold grant of the territory were refused for over a decade until war between Japan and China from 1894, and the series of Japanese victories that defined it, persuaded the Japanese cabinet in January 1895 to declare them Japanese territory, part of Yaeyama County, Okinawa prefecture. The Japanese claim rested on the doctrine of terra nullius – the presumption that the islands were uninhabited and not claimed or controlled by any other country. However, it stretches common sense to see the absence of Chinese protest or counter-claim as decisive under the circumstance of war, the more so as the appropriation of the Senkakus was followed just three months later by the acquisition of Taiwan, under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Nearly 40 years have passed since Kyoto University’s Inoue Kiyoshi reached his conclusion that, “Even though the [Senkaku] islands were not wrested from China under a treaty, they were grabbed from it by stealth, without treaty or negotiations, taking advantage of victory in war.”.... From 1895 to 1945, that is to say from the first to the second Japan-China war, China was in no position to contest Japan’s claims. A Japanese community of several hundred people settled on the Senkaku group, where, inter alia, they ran a dried bonito (katsuobushi) factory, and that settlement continued for almost a half-century till 1942. After its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, Japan was obliged by the Potsdam Declaration to surrender all territories seized through war, but it insisted then, and has continued to insist ever since, that the Senkakus were part of Okinawa (and therefore not a spoil of war).The difficulty with this is that they plainly were not part of Ryukyu’s “36 islands” in pre-modern times nor when the prefecture was established in 1879, being only tacked on to it 16 years later. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the US military took effective control of Okinawa and the Senkakus, and international attention only focussed again on the islands from 1968, when a UN (ECAFE) survey mission reported likely oil and gas reserves in their adjacent waters, and 1969, when the US agreed to return sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan. For the nearby Senkaku island group, it was careful to stress that what was being transferred to Japan were “administrative rights,” not sovereignty. As Kimie Hara of Canada’s Waterloo University points out, the US played a significant role in the creation and manipulation of the “Senkaku problem”: first in 1951 and then again in 1972. Under the 1951 San Francisco Treaty post-war settlement, it planted the seeds of multiple territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbours: Japan and 90 percent communist China over Okinawa/Senkaku, Japan and 100 percent communist USSR over the “Northern territories,” Japan and 50 percent communist Korea over the island of Takeshima (Korean: Tokdo). These disputed territories served “as ‘wedges' securing Japan in the Western bloc, or 'walls' dividing it from the communist sphere of influence.” Again in 1972 by leaving unresolved the question of ownership of the Senkaku islands when returning Okinawa to Japanese administration, US Cold War planners anticipated that the Senkakus would function as a “wedge of containment” of China. They understood that a “territorial dispute between Japan and China, especially over islands near Okinawa, would render the US military presence in Okinawa more acceptable to Japan.” The events of 2010 proved them far-sighted. On the eve of the reversion of Okinawa (the Senkakus included) to Japanese administration, both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China laid counter-claims. Dispute flared, only cooling when, in 1978, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made his circuit-breaking offer: “It does not matter if this question is shelved for some time, say ten years. Our generation is not wise enough to find a common language on this question. Our next generation will certainly be wiser. They will surely find a solution acceptable to all.” Despite occasional lapses, and a steady increase in the number of Chinese fishing boats taking from the waters around the islands (up to 400 per year), that “gentleman’s agreement” held until September 2010, when Japan apparently repudiated it by arresting the Chinese captain, insisting there was no dispute and refusing to listen to China’s protests.... By attaching priority to extracting an American promise to “protect” the Senkakus, Prime Minister Kan Naoto’s government showed its determination to continue Japan’s “Client State” status. The initiatives of Kan’s predecessor, Hatoyama Yukio, for closer Japan-China cooperation in the formation of an East Asian Community, became a thing of the past. Instead, Kan used the events to precipitate closer integration of Japanese and US military planning and operations in the Western Pacific and East Asia, and to cooperate in grand regional war games that were plainly intended to intimidate China.... The most detailed study in English of the Diaoyu/Senkaku issue, published just a decade ago, concluded that here were only four possible ways in which it might be resolved: by Sino-Japanese agreement, unilateral Japanese action, war, and referral to the International Court of Justice.50 Of these, he insisted, the first was the only “realistic” way forward. Blocking it for nearly three decades has been Japanese intransigence and insistence on exclusive “effective control.” Under the Kan government, Japan has moved away from the Hatoyama vision of cooperation in the construction of an “East Asian Community”, but the antagonistic approach to questions of territory, resources, and environment can hardly offer any way forward. Peace and security in East Asia depend on the governments and peoples of the region taking the initiative to remove the “wedges of containment” that US planners left ambiguously and threateningly embedded in the state system they designed more than half a century ago. For Okinawa the Senkaku/Diaoyu events serve as a message to think again about the history of the islands’ links with (mainland) Japan, China and Korea. Once the flourishing independent kingdom of Ryukyu, whose aspiration was to serve as the bridge linking the neighbouring states and peoples, Okinawa was subjected twice to forceful appropriation by mainland Japan, first in 1609 and then, decisively, in 1879 when its long and friendly links with China were finally severed. Modern history did not deal kindly with Okinawa, and today, as waves of chauvinism and militarism again wash on its shores, only by returning to the vision of the islands as uniquely close to China, Korea and mainland Japan (as written on the great “World Bridging” Bankoku shinryo bell, cast in the year 1458 and now on display in the prefectural museum), can it hope to calm and survive the gathering storms. (End excerpts) N.B. The author, Gavan McCormack, is emeritus professor of Australian National University, an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator, and author, most recently, of Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (New York, 2007, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing 2008 ). He has written extensively on "The Asia-Pacific Journal" site on matters to do with Okinawa and the US-Japan relationship. He delivered the Japanese version of the above paper to the Okinawa Forum, jointly sponsored and convened by Japan Focus and Okinawa University at Okinawa University in December 2010.
The War News Update blog continually posts about the conflicts boiling up in the China Sea and further south as China spreads out to claim waters well outside the recognized territorial limits. All are rich in oil deposits the countries who claim them have never exploited. China is hungry for oil, buying it up everywhere. Let them claim these territories and start drilling and they will no longer need to import. That's what it's all about. And it's gonna get hotter in the next few months.
