Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who is attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York, is in trouble on his home front. As he wants to present himself as a strong leader, who can't be toppled like his predecessor Yukio Hatoyama or ousted by his rival Ichiro Ozawa, he had to do something spectacular.
He did that something at the wrong time and in the wrong place, as we pointed it out in this column two weeks ago.
Firstly, he let his Ministry of Defense announce Japan would conduct a joint exercise with the United States based on a scenario of retaking a remote unidentified southwestern island, which of course is what the Japanese call Senkaku Island, the largest of the eight uninhabited islets a mere 120 miles northeast of Keelung.
That was followed up by the seizure of a Chinese trawler on Sept. 8 over waters close to the tiny archipelago known as Diaoyutai or Tiaoyutai, over which Japan, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan claim sovereignty. Zhan Qixiong, the skipper, and his crew were arrested, but later released.
Japan picked the worst time to raise an issue with its giant neighbor. It was on the eve of the Mukden Incident, which marked the beginning of Japanese aggression on China in 1931. The Tiaoyutais were the wrong place to start the issue. They had been placed under the jurisdiction of Yilan County shortly after Taiwan was restored to the Republic of China.
As a matter of fact, fishermen of the former Taihoku (Taipei) Prefecture, which includes the county of Yilan today, call Senkaku “No Man's Island.” It is a place where they used to go catching fish before the Japanese coast guard started chasing them away to protect what they saw as Japan's sole right to tap its vast known undersea oil reserves.
Kan dared to irritate China, wrongly convinced that the U.S. would support Japan in his attempt to challenge the growing sea power of the People's Liberation Army. And it backfired.
Tokyo's influential Asahi Shimbun said the release of the skipper “left an impression that Japan will cave in when pressured.” The Yomiuri Shimbun, the world's largest circulation newspaper, blasted it as “a political decision that put the mending of relations as a priority.” Its editorial called for an assertion of Japanese sovereignty over the Senkakus “both domestically and abroad.”
Kan is in a no-win situation simply because he doesn't know history.
Hayashi Shihei, Japan's first cartographer, positioned the Senkakus as belonging to China in the eighteenth century. Japan annexed the kingdom of the Ryukyus as Okinawa Prefecture in 1872 despite Beijing's protest that the kingdom had been a vassal state of China for more than four centuries.
After the Mutan-she or Botan-sha incident in which fishermen of Miyako-jima were killed in Hengchun in 1871 and Japan invaded southern Taiwan two years later, negotiations were held in Beijing and an agreement was signed between Qing China and Meiji Japan to divide the long chain of archipelagos, those islands south of Okinawa belonging to China and those north of it to Japan. Under the agreement, which was not ratified because of the subsequent Sino-Japanese war and China's defeat in 1895, the Tiaoyutais would be under Chinese jurisdiction.
In fact, the Empress Dowager granted the islets to her court minister Shen Shuan-huai as a fief and his granddaughter kept the order.
During the Cairo conference of 1943, Madame Chiang Kai-shek did not know this historical fact and failed to include in the Cairo Declaration the Okinawa chain as part of the territories imperial Japan illegally occupied and had to be given up after World War II. Had it been included, the Okinawans would have had their independence.
She was a diplomat par excellence though she certainly didn't know the Okinawans were against the Japanese and many of them were killed by their retreating Japanese masters that were ousted by the American Marines in May 1945.
Without her persuasion, the United States wouldn't have helped China under aggression. History tells us China survived the eight-year war thanks to Chiang Kai-shek's refusal to surrender and American participation in the war against the Axis powers.
The most urgent task Kan now faces is to propose talks with the People's Republic of China and Taiwan to settle the fishing rights on waters around the uninhabited islets by shelving the dispute over sovereignty.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於99.09.27，The China Post 4版）