Chinese aggressions: Japan to bolster military base on island idyll

Island of Ishigaki is set to be the site for a substantial deployment of hardware and troops
By Kim Sengupta Ishigaki

A Japanese Self-Defence Forces' vehicle carrying units of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles leaves a port on Japan's southern island of Ishigaki, Okinawa prefecture.

If war is to break out, then Ishigaki would be the frontline. 

This is the island where Japan feels the most under threat from China and the place it will be installing missiles and troops amid clashes at sea, accusations and recriminations.
While international attention is on whether Games diplomacy in South Korea, with the presence of Kim Jong-un’s sister and henchmen present for the Winter Olympics, will lead to peace breaking out, tension between China and its neighbours have continued to grow.
Throughout last year, while Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un traded public insults, Beijing has been quietly bolstering its presence on the extraordinary chain of artificial isles it has been building in waters near and far taking advantage of what it calls "the strategic window of opportunity.”

Three airfields have been put into its seven bases in the disputed Spratly chain. 

There, and elsewhere, aerial photographs from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reveal facilities awash with fortified shelters for warships, hangers for aircraft and radar, underground bunkers and missile emplacement positions.
The Chinese calls a series of archipelagos the "first island chain of defence” stretching in an arc from the South China Seas to Russia’s Kurils. 

For Japan the most vulnerable point is the Senkaku, to which Beijing has laid claims with surrounding isles, in particular Ishikagi 90 nautical miles away seen as the obvious targets.
Hundreds of fishing boats from China, escorted by coastguard ships, or, at times, warships have been in the seas leading, at times, driving back Japanese fishermen leading to clashes with Japanese coast guards. 

There has been a recent spate of incursions into airspace by Chinese warplanes and the appearance for the first time, a few weeks ago, of a nuclear attack submarine in these waters.
The Japanese government are now finalising the deployment of missiles batteries, anti-aircraft and anti-ship, radar installations and around 600 troops to Ishigaki.
Final details are likely to emerge next month. 

The Independent understands the surface to air missiles are likely include American made MIM-104 Patriots capable of taking down Chinese ballistic missiles with enemy vessels being targeted by SSM-1s which carry up to 500lbs of high-explosives and have range of over a hundred miles. 

There are future plans for a joint missile system involving Japan and Western Europe to be installed in a project involving the British, French and Italian MBDA and Mitsubishi Electrics.
China’s attempt at ocean hegemony has led to international reaction.
The US Defence Secretary General James Mattis stressed during a visit to Tokyo that the Washington is fully committed to backing Japan over the Senkakus. 

On a broader basis, the US has been sending warships through the China Seas to underline the right to freedom of navigation. 

The British Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that HMS Sutherland, an anti-submarine ship, will be sailing through the South China Seas. 

The navies of America, India, Japan and Australia, will be holding naval manoeuvres.

HMS Sutherland

The tiny Senkakus were used in the past by a small Japanese community scratching a living out of bonito fishing and collecting albatross feathers. 

But they were then abandoned had been lying unpopulated for 78 years with basically scientific and geographical exploration groups the only visitors.
That these five islets and three barren rocks, with a total area of just seven kilometres, has become a potential flashpoint for a conflict between two modern industrialised states may be reminiscent of the Jorge Luis Borges’s view that Britain and Argentina going to war over the Falklands was “like two bald men fighting over a comb”.
In fact, there was little interest in the islands, apart from its fishing grounds, until an international survey in 1969 concluded large undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. 

The following year China began its claims of ownership.
The steady growth of Chinese presence in the seas, say the Japanese, has damaged the country’s fishing industry. 

Many of Beijing’s coast guard vessels are rebranded warships and the crews of Chinese 'fishing' boats are not fishermen at all, but peoples’ militia in disguise out to provoke. 

The confrontation means that Ishigaki fishermen like Yukihidi Higa can no longer catch the red snappers and groupers they used to off the Senkakus.
“Of course it has affected my earnings, I can no longer go there because of the Chinese and their big ships” he stated. 

“ But they are not just taking the fish, most of the coral from the sea has been stripped over the years, this is not good for marine life.”
The missile deployment comes at a time of great controversy in Japan as premier Shinzo Abe seeks to revise Japan’s post-Second World War pacifist constitution mandated, he holds, by a strong election victory. 

Last month, his cabinet approved an increase of 1.3 per cent in the annual military budget raising it to a record $ 45.8 billion for the year.
The military deployment is also going to be a key factor in Ishigaki’s municipal election next month. “This is certainly going to be part of my campaign. It is of course a very important topic and it needs to be discussed fully and the city will have to agree on providing the land ” said Yoshitaka Nakayama, the mayor.
“I am in favour of the deployment by our Self Defence Forces (SDF). We have seen the Chinese behave very aggressively, they are coming into our territorial waters, our fishermen have been prevented from fishing, our coastguards are having lots of problems, we have seen their planes fly into our airspace. Putting the missile systems here will act as a warning, it may stop Chinese aggression and a conflict in the future.”
The military was a key issue in the election in Nago, the capital of the Okinawa prefecture, last week in the defeat of the incumbent Mayor Susumu Inamine, by Taketoyo Toguchi, a candidate backed by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The Mayor had been an opponent of a US Marines base remaining in Okinawa. 

Mr Toguchi wanted them to stay and backed a plan by Washington and Tokyo to relocate it from a central urban area to one less populated.
For Yoshiyuki Toita, the secretary general of the Yaeyama Defence Association, the result showed “that attitudes are changing: people are beginning to see the dangers posed by China, which is following an expansionist policy. If the Japanese government and the SDF do nothing it will send the wrong message and the Chinese will feel even bolder.”
The defence associations across Japan are private groups which claim to be independent of government. 

Mr Toita, however, is a member of Mayor Nakayama’s campaign and will be spreading his message in support of the military deployment.

"This is about security. We have achieved good things here in Ishigaki and we must protect this community and Japan.”
Many are apprehensive, however, that the achievements may be put at risk by militarisation. Subtropical Ishigaki, with its mountains and mangrove forests, beaches and birdlife, has, somewhat surprisingly for a place not widely known, topped TripAdvisor’s “Destinations on the Rise” in the Travellers’ Choice awards.
“We have definitely seen a steady rise in tourism and this growth has taken place despite this place being so remote. The new airport has been a great plus factor” said Hiro Uehara, the owner of a bar and restaurant.-
Around a dozen coast guard ships are the current line of defence. 

Captain Kenichi Kikuchi, in command of the Taketomi, wanted to stress that they do their utmost to avoid confrontations. 

“We are careful , we are careful because we do not want to escalate matters and also have to mind that the Chinese Navy ships as well their coastguard vessels tend to be large” he said. 

“ But we also do our duty and deal with problems when they arise and make sure we are not outnumbered by the Chinese.”-
What will happen when the missiles and troops are deployed? 

 “That is a decision for the Japanese government and the Self Defence Forces. They will decide what is right. But it could become very interesting.”-

Sina Delenda Est

The Senkaku Islands have become the site of renewed Chinese aggression

By Emma Graham-Harrison in Ishigaki

Part of the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

The Chinese flotilla arrived at the start of August, more than 300 fishing boats escorted by 15 vast coastguard ships, some of them armed. 

They circled the Senkaku Islands for a week, drifting into and out of Japanese territorial waters as Tokyo’s own coastguard played cat and mouse with the intruders.
Then they were gone, but the message they left behind was clear. 

China had upped the stakes again in a simmering territorial dispute that has made the southern tip of Japan’s island archipelago one of the most dangerous places in the region.

Japan accuses China of threatening Pacific peace

Ishigaki Island does not look like a frontline. 

Japan’s own tropical idyll, it is a sleepy place of pineapple fields and mango orchards, where thousands of tourists potter along white sand beaches and scuba dive in crystal clear seas. 

Yet this tiny dot on the edge of the Pacific is the closest Japanese town to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, once inhospitable home to a tuna processing factory, now abandoned but key to lucrative fishing grounds, oil and gas fields and a strategic shipping route.
Under other circumstances the rocky outcrops – their name means sharp pavilions – would have only a unique species of mole as their sole claim for international attention. 

But their location, and competing claims of ownership from China and Japan have made them a potential flashpoint for war and focus of extreme anxiety from Tokyo to Washington.
Beijing’s maritime ambitions have been thrown into sharp focus by its extraordinary creation of a chain of islands from previously open seas over the past few years. 

It has shored up ambitious claims to swaths of ocean far from the Chinese coastline with the frantic construction of artificial islands that has seen runways, radar and guns appear on what were submerged coral reefs just five years ago.

Ishigaki Island in Okinawa.

Its strategic plans for the East China Sea have drawn less attention, perhaps because developments have not been so dramatic. 

But the prospect of tensions escalating into hostilities is real.

It faces in Japan a more powerful rival than any farther south, and one that has the US as a protector, bound by treaty to come to Tokyo’s aid if its territory is attacked. 

Relations between the uneasy neighbours are so strained that they have not even got a hotline set up for military communication in a crisis, despite years of talks aimed at establishing one.
The issue is so pressing that when new US defence secretary James Mattis visited Tokyo last week, confirming America’s commitment to defend the islands was top of the foreign minister’s agenda.
“Secretary Mattis made clear that the Senkaku Islands are in the territories under the administration of Japan,” Fumio Kishida said after the meeting. 

Few tourists visiting Ishigaki notice the trouble that is brewing in paradise, but those who live on the island have seen a slow escalation in tensions transform their town and lives, particularly those of the fishermen chased away from the Senkakus by Chinese boats.
“What is frightening for us is that when we go there, the Chinese government ships aggressively approach us, they are much larger than our fishing boats and we are afraid of collisions,” said Manabu Namisato, 53, who has been fishing for three decades.
Four years ago a Chinese coastguard ship around 150 times the size of his 10-tonne tuna fishing vessel nearly rammed him on the high seas. 

“I don’t know if they are coming towards us intentionally or not,” he said, but the memory still unnerves him. 

“If that boat had hit me I wouldn’t be here today.”
The fishermen have been warned for their own safety to stay away, but don’t need to be told. 

“It’s not that we don’t want to go there, it’s that we can’t go there. We have agreed to talk to you, because we are afraid the situation may get worse.”
The fleet that arrived last August was exceptionally large, but comes after years of regular incursions – and the government fears another influx this summer.
From Ishigaki to Tokyo, Japanese fear that the aggressive coastguards and the fleets they shepherd to the Senkakus are part of a plan from Beijing to bolster China’s claim to the islands by establishing de facto control of the area’s fishing ground.

A shopping arcade in Ishigaki. 

“There is possibility the Chinese government will use this fact that our fishing boats are not going there,” admitted an official from the ministry of foreign affairs, adding that the argument would have little standing under international law.
Still, rising numbers of Chinese boats flooding into the area each year have put Japan in a difficult position. 

It does not want to look weak but fears using military force would give China a long-awaited excuse for further confrontation.
“If we send ships in the Chinese government will use this to further escalate the situation and we don’t want that,” the official added.
Both sides claim history is on their side, although Japan is the only country ever known to have citizens living on the islands – for two decades last century. 

China’s claim is also slightly undermined by its timing, with the first objection to Japanese ownership claims lodged only after publication of a UN report locating deposits of oil and gas nearby.
There has already been a sharp rise in tensions since 2012 when Japan nationalised the islands. 

The move warded off a planned sale to Tokyo’s then mayor, a hardline nationalist apparently hoping to develop the islands, which would certainly have inflamed sentiments in China.
But Beijing saw, or chose to see, aggression where Tokyo felt it was defending an uneasy status quo. Soon violent protests broke out around China, with Japanese cars, shops and factories vandalised, several firms shutting down production and tour trips abruptly cancelled.
At sea, everything changed. 

Chinese coastguard ships now regularly sail towards the islands, often escorting fleets of fishing boats. 

And where once the Chinese boats would stray into Japanese waters perhaps once every couple of years, there has been such a regular pattern of two or three monthly violations in recent years that it is hard not to see a schedule.
Japan says China now has a fleet that includes repurposed naval ships, the largest coastguard patrol in the world, and arms on many vessels. 

In response Japan has expanded its own coastguard, taking the Ishigaki fleet alone to 16 boats stationed at a newly extended pier.
There are daily patrols to the Senkakus, a trip of five or six hours each way, with teams on standby to show up in greater force. 

“Right now our current policy is to exceed the Chinese vessels around Senkaku, so if they are showing up with three or four, we want more, if they show up with six or seven we want more,” said Hiraki Odagi, spokesman for the Japanese coastguard.
The boats have cannons, and some of the sailors bear arms, but their missions are shrouded in military secrecy. 

“I’m only at liberty to say we had more than the number of Chinese vessels,” Odagi said.
China’s air force is also testing Japan’s defences, with Japanese fighter jets now scrambled twice a day on average to warn incoming aircraft away from the air space over the islands. 

There were 22 scrambles in 2008, but 644 last year.
Some in Ishigaki, alarmed by China’s encroachment on the islands, feel Japan should have done more to assert its control over the islands decades ago, when China had less money, less military power and less international clout.
“I now think that the Japanese government should have done something,” said Yoshitaka Nakayama, mayor of Ishigaki, who is calling on the government to push ahead with plans to deploy a unit of the Japanese military, formally known as the self-defence force, to the island. 

“Meanwhile China has become a superpower… and if we continue to put this issue on the shelf and not do anything then China will become even more powerful.”
Even a small harbour, or pier, on the main Senkaku island where fishermen could take shelter in bad weather might persuade more to risk a trip to the area, while reinforcing Japanese claims, he says. But years of pleas have fallen on deaf official ears, and Nakayama fears Tokyo’s caution could pave the way for disaster.
“The situation I am worried about is this – a Chinese ship or fishing boat would come to the island, and fishermen land on the island. Then Japanese police and coastguard officials would go on the island to remove them. Then the Chinese will give a reason to deploy warships to the island, saying ‘we need to protect our citizens’.”
The dispute goes to the heart of concerns about China’s growing ambition, as it looks to project power across a region once dominated by America. 

And while its expansion in the South China Sea has caused alarm around the world, Japanese officials point out that East China Sea, where the Senkakus lie, is even closer to China’s shoreline and on the path out to the Pacific.
In Ishigaki many believe a stronger position is the only way to ward off disaster, with a bullishness that carries a disturbing echo of China’s own uncompromising stance.
“I think the Japanese government has prioritised the relationship with China, including economic ties,” said Yoshiyuki Toita, secretary general of the Yaeyama Defence Association which brings together more than 100 people on Ishigaki and its surrounding islands to campaign and study.
“If we just worry about temporary economic loss and give in, China may create a military facility in this area, so there will be more national security loss than economic loss. Japanese people should understand that and we should raise awareness about issues of territorial claims.”

Chinese aggressions

1 DMZ (demilitarised zone between North and South Korea): Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions keep tensions high in a heavily militarised peninsula
2 Kuril islands held by Russia, claimed by Japan as part of its ‘northern territories’: The Kuril Islands were seized by Soviet forces during the second world war. Failure to resolve the resulting territorial dispute has soured relations between Moscow and Tokyo.
3 Sea of Japan (between North Korea and Japan): Pyongyang fired a series of ballistic missiles into the sea off its coast last summer, after the US and South Korea agreed to deploy a new anti-missile system. The area has seen a history of disputes between Jaopan, Russia and South Korea.
4 Taiwan Strait (between Taiwan and China): China was angered by a controversial Trump phone call, warning Washington its right to the island was ‘non-negotiable’.
5 Senkaku islands (East China Sea): It may prove a global flashpoint as armed Chinese coastguard vessels invade.
6 Paracel islands (South China Sea): Woody Island is the largest of the Paracels, which have been under China’s control since 1974. Beijing has installed missile launchers while the US wants to enforce freedom of navigation.
7 Scarborough shoal (South China Sea): There has been a five-year dispute between the Philippines and China over ownership of the territory near Luzon island.
8 Spratly Islands (South China Sea): China has built a runway with capacity for military planes and is using dredgers to build artificial islands. Vietnam disputes China’s ambitions.