In World War II, Japan’s island-hopping invasions created a network of strong points from which the military government could control the Pacific and the China Sea. Militarism may have been abandoned but Japan’s modern claims to the Kuril and Diaoyu islands stem from the very same reasons that it went to war in 1941 — oil. Japan, with little oil and gas of its own, is the world’s largest importer of LNG and a major purchaser of oil. Yet the 410 kilometers of the China Sea between the tiny uninhabited Diaoyu islands, 170 kilometers northwest of Taiwan, may hold substantial oil and gas reserves. The Japanese maintain that they “discovered” the Diaoyu islands which they call the Senkaku, in 1895 and controlled them until the US occupation in 1945. Crucial to their legal case is that the Americans formally returned the islands to them in 1971.
The Chinese, for their part, say they discovered the islands in 1372 and only ceded them to the Japanese in the 1895 Shimonoseki Treaty that ended the first Sino-Japanese War. These should have been returned to China under the provisions of the 1943 Cairo Declaration that deprived Japan of all its conquests. There is clearly much for lawyers to argue over. Japan’s geographical case is, however, patently weak. While the islands stand at the edge of the mainland Chinese continental shelf, they are nowhere near Japan. Indeed, the 2,270 meter deep Okinawa Trough runs length-wise for much of the distance between the islands and Japan.
Japanese attempts to let exploration licences in the China Sea on the basis of their ownership of the islands, produced angry protests from Beijing and coincided with fury over the school textbook which whitewashed Japanese wartime atrocities in China. The Taiwanese are just as interested in possible undersea oil and gas but this week the row centered on Japanese naval action against Taiwanese fishermen — to protect whom the Taiwanese have dispatched a frigate. This dispute over a group of low-lying islands, the largest of which is less than 20 acres needs to be settled by international arbitration. Such a process will be the harder because China refuses to acknowledge the legal existence of Taiwan, but it is the only way to defuse a potentially very dangerous situation. Rather than a decision awarding the islands to one country, maybe all three claimants could reach agreement on joint ownership and joint exploitation of the possible wealth beneath the ocean floor. This is not Japan’s only island row. It is still demanding the return of all the Kuril Islands to its north which were seized by Russia in 1945. In 1875, Japanese settlers left Sakhalin island to Russian settlers in return for the Kurils. The Russians, now aware of the highly promising oil and gas prospects so close to the proven reserves off Sakhalin, have offered only the two most southern islands. Though Tokyo has preferred to talk directly to Moscow, Japanese politicians have mooted the prospect of international arbitration. If they are prepared to consider this solution for the Kurils, then they must also admit it for the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.
China and Japan are both energy-hungry. As the economic spotlight shifts to the Far East, they will have commercial battles to fight aplenty. They do not, however, need a military confrontation over oil.
