Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe did a hard sell of Japan’s case for holding the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He managed to persuade the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires that Japan is a “safe pair of hands” to host the event and that radiation risks from the still leaking Fukushima nuclear plant had been “contained”.
While leaks of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear complex (crippled by a mega earthquake and tsunami in 2011) into the Pacific Ocean make international headlines, Japan-China “war games” over the Senkaku-Diaoyu islets are little publicized. Yet this cat and mouse game could spill over into a regional conflict at almost any time, experts say.
At the centre of the simmering (and often near-boiling) dispute is the issue of who owns the rocky, uninhabited islets in the East China Sea known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands and in Chinese as Diaoyu. Japan and China each claim that they do while Taiwan also lays claim to the territory, which it refers to as Tiaoyutai.
Mineral and oil deposits may exist in the surrounding sea, but for the moment that is not the issue. It is a case of “pure” nationalism rather than “resource” nationalism. Scarcely a day passes now when Japanese and Chinese coastguard vessels chasing each other around the isles do not come close to confrontation, while fighter jets are regularly scrambled by both sides.
“Coastguard ships from both sides are butting up against each other, and the dangers of a collision, accident or miscalculation” are high, says north-east Asia expert and Columbia University professor Gerald Curtis. “If someone gets killed, and however much governments wanted to contain the incident, people would be out in the streets in China burning Japanese factories and demanding a Chinese response. It’s very dangerous.”
There has already been a rehearsal for such a clash. When then Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda “nationalized” the Senkaku Islands a year ago in response to goading by ultra-nationalist former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, an outburst of popular anger in China saw Japanese factories ransacked and Japanese cars burned in the streets of numerous Chinese cities.
Curtis is by no means alone in harbouring serious concerns about a possible spill-over of tensions. While some believe that the war games going on around the Sekaku Islands are part of a controlled exercise in brinkmanship, Kent Calder, head of the Reischauer Centre for East Asian Studies in Washington, is not so sanguine.
“At the top level, diplomats and to some extent business people understand that this is a dangerous situation that should be stabilized and that territory [claims] should be put back on the shelf,” he says. “But those that have the strongest stake are also exposed to domestic politics, and it’s difficult for them to be advocates” of a peaceful solution, he tells Emerging Markets. “What worries me is how coordinated are all the [players]. Is this a chess game or a chaotic interaction? I fear that it does have some element of the chaotic about it.”
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Japan has exercised administrative control over the Senkakus since 1895 when it surveyed the territory and declared it uninhabited. After World War II (from 1945 to 1972) the Senkakus (along with Okinawa) were administered by the US but then handed back to Japan, a move which China opposed but tacitly acquiesced in until mineral and other resources were detected in the vicinity in the 1970s, when it began to reassert claims.
The dispute (although Tokyo claims there is no “dispute” since the isles unequivocally belong to Japan) might have continued to simmer on the back burner had not former prime minister Noda agreed in 2012 to purchase three of the Senkaku Islands from their Japanese private owner on behalf of the national government.
This greatly inflamed the issue from China’s point of view, and the US got dragged reluctantly into the quarrel too. Although the US takes no official position on competing sovereignty claims, the islands are included within the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty and therefore defence of the islands would require the US to come to Japan’s aid.
Visiting Beijing in mid-September, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs Daniel Russel said the world did not want to see the dispute get out of hand. Global interest in stability, he said, was “too strong for the world’s second- and third-largest economies to remain at odds. We hope that leaders will exercise restraint and will consistently pursue diplomatic and friendly moves,” he said.
Russell spoke a few days after Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga suggested in Tokyo that the Abe administration might consider stationing “government workers” on the Senkakus – a move which would be potentially incendiary. “That would be a big game changer,” says Columbia University’s Curtis.
Japan “may have said they are thinking of doing that, but is it part of the game they are playing with the Chinese? There is an implicit understanding that there is no infrastructure and no people on the Senkaku islands. If the Japanese were to [upset that], the Chinese would be compelled to react, and then things would escalate,” Curtis adds.
For now, the hope is that continuing political, bureaucratic and business exchanges going between lower level Japanese and Chinese officials at both central and provincial levels can create a climate whereby Japan’s Abe and Chinese president Xi Jinping find it possible to contemplate a summit meeting and to restore some degree of normalcy in diplomatic relations, experts say.
One idea that has been floated is that Japan, while continuing to refuse to recognize any formal “dispute” over ownership of the Senkakus, would acknowledge the existence of a “foreign policy problem” over the issue. China in turn might continue to reopen negotiations over exploitation of resources near the islands. But such a solution does not seem to be a high priority right now for Japan, as Abe basks in the glory of securing the Olympics and believes that “no one should mess with Japan,” as Curtis puts it.