Chino, Japan, Dec. 28, 2020—China is apparently racing to expand its seawater reach in the Pacific to disable Joe Biden to confront Beijing to end its hegemonist Belt and Road policy. The Japanese newspaper Sankei reported on Dec. 28 that Chinese government survey ships have been circling around OkinoTorishima Island, a tiny speck surfaced two decades ago by underwater volcanic eruption, south of Tokyo’s Ogasawara Islands.
For years China has been arguing that OkinoTorishima is a rock above the sea level, not an island as Japan has been claiming by building a sovereignty marker. The island is yet to be recognized as Japanese sovereign territory, only that ‘the rock’ is Japanese land but that Japan cannot claim sovereignty on the surrounding reef.
Chinese government ships apparently have been conducting research based on this provision of the 1994 United Nations Law of the Sea conference and build a long runway and building structures in Spratly Islands in the South Pacific over the past several years. The archipelago is being claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and China.
Pacifist Japan, or the country dominated by confrontation-fearing bureaucrats about national policies, has been taking a wait and sea attitude about OkinoTorishima. Japan has assigned the address to the island, postal zip code, and telephone area code. In 19888, New York Times and later in 2003 and 2005 Wall Street Journal naively have printed op-ed articles in support of China’s argument that OkinoTorishima, which Japan first named so in 1929, that it is a rock, not an island. Japan and China held a bilateral talk in 2004 about the island but both fielded their respective arguments and nothing conclusive emerged as a result.
OkinoTorishima is close to Palau Island, so it is strategically important for the United States. China has been violating Japan’s exclusive sea zone around Senkaku Islands in the Sea of Japan for years, and Japanese lawmakers and bureaucrats have been taking hardly any action against the invasion allowing China to start arguing that the island is China’s sovereign land.
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