The Economist explains

Who really owns the Senkaku islands?

By D.Z.

OVER the past year the Senkaku islands, a clutch of five uninhabited islets in the East China Sea, have shown their ability to convulse relations between China and Japan, Asia’s two biggest powers. They have even raised the spectre of military conflict, which America fears it might be dragged into. The stakes are high. So who actually owns the Senkakus?

If possession is nine-tenths of the law, the answer is simple: Japan. It claims to have “discovered” the islands, a terra nullius belonging to no one, in 1884. In early 1895 it annexed them, shortly after Japan had defeated a weakened China in a brief war and seized Taiwan, which lies just to their south, as war spoils. One Tatsushiro Koga was licensed to develop the islands. He set up a bonito-processing station whose 200 employees also killed the once-abundant short-tailed albatross for its feathers. The Koga family’s last employees left during the second world war. Upon Japan’s defeat in 1945 control fell to the Americans, who used the islands for bombing practice. In 1972, at the end of the American occupation, the Japanese government resumed responsibility for the Senkakus.

By then, however, oil and gas reserves had been identified under the seabed surrounding the islands. China, which calls them the Diaoyu islands, asserted its claim, as did Taiwan, which is closest to the islands (and which is also claimed by China). China’s claim is vague, and is based on things such as a Chinese portolano from 1403 recording the islands. It all speaks to an earlier world in which China lay at the heart of an ordered East Asian system of tributary states—an order shattered by Japan’s militarist rise from the late 19th century. What this history tells you is not—contrary to modern Chinese claims—that China controlled the Diaoyus, for it never did. Rather, the islands were known to the Chinese because they served as navigational waypoints for tributary missions between the great cosmopolitan Chinese port of Quanzhou and Naha, capital of the Ryukyu island kingdom, China’s most loyal vassal. In 1879 Japan snuffed out the ancient kingdom. Naha is now the main town on the main island of Japan’s archipelago prefecture of Okinawa. Some Chinese nationalists call not only for the Senkakus’ return, but for Okinawa too.

In the late 1970s China and Japan agreed to kick the dispute into the long grass. But China’s attitude has hardened, especially since September 2012, when the Japanese government bought from their private owner three of the islands it did not already own. It was in order to prevent them falling into the hands of an ultranationalist, Shintaro Ishihara, then governor of Tokyo. But China saw it as a provocation and sent vessels and aircraft to challenge Japan’s control of the Senkakus. China’s announcement on November 23rd of an East China Sea “air defence identification zone” which covers the Senkakus is further evidence of its attempt to alter the status quo. Much more than presumed oil and gas reserves, emotion is now driving China’s actions, in particular notions of national honour and a desire to regain the centrality in East Asia that it for centuries enjoyed. This dispute is a microcosm of that desire, which makes it so potentially dangerous.

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