If anything should cause Washington to
desist from war-mongering, it is the Japanese claim that there exists no
islets dispute whatsoever. Tokyo maintains the pretense that the
Senkaku-Diaoyu issue is just being exploited by Beijng for
energy-exploration domination of the seabed and that the controversy
will soon blow over like a summer squall. This diplomatic posture is, in
reality, contradicted by the dispatch of battle-ready Japanese warships
and fighter aircraft to the surrounding waters and airspace.
.
Japan has drawn its own ADIZ, modeling it after the 1945 airspace map drawn up by the U.S. occupation force. The
Japanese claim includes not just those barren rocks but also a vast
swath of far inside the continental shelf, which is claimed by China and
South Korea. In 2011, Beijing and Seoul filed a joint position paper
and complaint with the United Nations against Japanese encroachment
across the continental shelf.
US-Japanese Militarism and China’s Air-Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over Disputed Islets. Pretext for Another Pacific War?
Rejecting the World Court
The
quickest resolution to the Senkaku-Diaoyu quarrel, along with the
overlapping air-defense zones, is to bring a territorial case to the
International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world court that handles
international boundary disputes at The Hague. The ICJ requires sovereign
parties involved in the dispute to accept the court’s jurisdiction and
abide by its ruling. Japan’s rejection of an ICJ case therefore
indicates serious weaknesses in its territorial claims under existing
international law.
Before
proceeding, as someone born on Japanese soil it is difficult not to be
arguing instead in Japan’s defense against hostile neighboring
countries. Protection of one’s native land is paramount, especially when
considering the fact that Japan has so little acreage compared with its
gigantic neighbors. By the same token, for its national honor, Japan
should relinquish any territory that might still be illegally held as a
vestige of the colonialist policies of the past 120 years. The seizure
and renaming of those tiny islets was a disgraceful act of international
deception, which harms Japan’s postwar policy of legitimate
self-defense under international law.
Logic of Air Defense Zones
.
China’s recent move to declare an
air-defense zone is not precedent-setting, since the U.S., Japan and
South Korea have already imposed their own arbitrary ADIZ boundaries in
the East China Sea. Under ADIZ rules, which by the way are not regulated
by any international treaty, civilian aircraft are required to notify
the relevant national air-traffic authority of its flight plan and
aircraft number.
These security measures are especially
needed over disputed maritime areas to avert the shoot-down of a
civilian aircraft mistaken as a military intruder. The potential for the
deliberated downing of a passenger jet was highlighted in the missile
that struck KAL007 in 1983, when a Korean Airline jet was flown on a CIA
espionage mission over a Soviet air-defense base on the Kamchatka
Peninsula, just north of Japan. An air-defense zone is therefore
sometimes necessary to ensure the safety of civil aviation and to
discourage harmful incidents by intelligence agencies or terrorist
hijackers.
Ishihara’s intervention in the Senkaku-Diaoyu dispute was initiated much earlier, back in 1996 with the construction of a lighthouse on the islets, intended to enable boat landings, by the Japan Youth Federation. This rightist organization was created by a Ginza-based yakuza group whose members are “zai-nichi” or ethnic Koreans, specifically descendants of collaborators with the Japanese colonialist occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1895 to 1945. The ethnic gangster group provided campaign funds for Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Ishihara in spite of his racist agitation against third-world immigrants from Korea, China and the Philippines.
Manchurian Memories
More
worrisome perhaps from the Chinese historical perspective is the
potential for covert sabotage of one of Japan’s own passenger jets. A
violent plane crash, blamed on Beijing, could rally international
support for invoking the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty to launch a
counterstrike against Beijing. Then notorious precedent for false-flag
attacks was set in the 1931 Mukden Incident, when Imperial Army officers
bombed the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad (Mantetsu). The
clandestine operation provided the pretext for an outright military
invasion of northeast China . Soon after the plot was exposed in the
world press, Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, former head of
the Mantetsu, led the 1933 walk-out from League of Nations, which marked
the actual start of World War II.
The legacy of the Manchurian covert operation is also a major
chapter in the family history of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose
grandfather Nobusuke Kishi became the finance and economy minister of
the puppet state of Manchukuo as a direct beneficiary of that false-flag
attack. Inside Manchuria , Kishi sponsored the infamous bioweapons Unit
731, which launched mass-murder attacks on populous cities with bubonic
plague and Hanta virus. Simultaneously, Kishi served as wartime head of
the Munitions Ministry, which developed an atomic bomb program on Konan
( Hungnam Island ) in northern Korea and inside Fukushima Prefecture .Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is an unrepentant admirer of his grandfather Kishi, often quoting his forebear on the necessity of nuclear weapons for Japan . The naval standoff around the Senkaku-Diaoyu islets, as a provocation campaign, is connected with the continuing nuclear armaments program centered in Fukushima Prefecture, where the military ran uranium and thorium mines in the late 1930s, under a secret project codenamed BUND-1.
The pall of secrecy is being reinforced by the Liberal Democratic Party, which has just rammed through a state secrets law aimed at suppressing whistleblowers and journalists on grounds of national security in foreign affairs. While the Senkaku-Diaoyu clash serves as a news diversion from the massive radioactive releases from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant, the maritime conflict also serves as a rallying point for Abe’s calls for “nuclear capability”.
The postwar “peace” Constitution, forbidding Japan from war as an instrument of state policy, was drafted with assistance from Americans aiming to prevent a repeat of the wartime horrors. However, a by-now forgotten point that needs reminding is that the United States was a de facto ally of Japanese militarist aggression in Manchuria, where U.S. Army observers and railway engineers with the Harriman-owned Union Pacific Railway were stationed until just before the Pearl Harbor attack..
Statements by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in support of Tokyo’s claims on the islets reveal a deep-seated split between the Pentagon’s global military agenda and the State Department’s traditional support for democracy and sovereignty.
Deceptions in History
Tokyo’s claim to the Senkaku group is based on the principle of “terra nullis”, a Latin term that means the site was uninhabited and unclaimed until discovery by Japan. On historical record, however, the Diaoyu group was registered as part of Toucheng Township in northeast Taiwan, the closest land mass to those islets (140 kilometers versus 170 km distance from Ishigaki Island, Okinawa Prefecture).
Japanese
“discovery” of the islets in January 1895 happened to coincide with the
seven-month-long First Sino-Japanese War. That conflict ended in April
of that same year with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, under
which diplomats of the defeated Qing Dynasty ceded the Korean Peninsula
and Taiwan to Japanese rule.
While that treaty, drafted and signed
under coercion, did not specifically mention the Diaoyu group, those
islets formed the critical flank for subsequent Japanese naval
operations, which began in June against resistance from the newly
declared Republic of Formosa. Japanese cruisers and troop carriers had
to cruise past the Senkaku isets to attack the offshore Pescadore
Islands in the Taiwan Strait and then proceed to the southernmost tip of
Taiwan. In short, capture of the Daioyu was an integral step in Japan’s
first war against China and in preparation for its military takeover of
Taiwan.
Taiwan was the victim of aggression from the first joint U.S.-Japan military operations decades prior to the Nine-Power intervention against the Boxer Rebellion, which destroyed Beijing and Tianjin at the turn of the century. The punitive Taiwan Expedition of 1874 was organized by American Civil War veteran Gen. Charles Le Gendre, while the Japanese invasion forces were led by Saigo Tsugumori. These real-life figures inspired the fictional characters for the film “The Last Samurai” with Tom Cruise in the role of Capt. Nathan Algren (modeled after Le Gendre) and Ken Watanabe as Katsumoto (Saigo Takamori, Tsugumori’s elder brother).
In contrast to the romantic Orientalism of that Hollywood version of events, the actual historical figures were not traditionalist practitioners of the warrior code known as “bushido.” In fact, Le Gendre and the Saigo brothers were military modernizers and aggressive imperialists responsible for the slaughter of Taiwanese aboriginal people who established the guidelines for Japanese expansionism into Korea and China.
Since the 1879 visit to Japan of retired President and Civil War hero Ulysses Grant and as continued by Theodore Roosevelt during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, the United States was firmly allied with its fellow republic, Meiji Japan , against a “backward” East Asia .
The American view of republican Japan conveniently ignored the “deep-state” power of a coterie of militarist aristocrats and war industrialists who stood above the law from the 1868 Restoration until the 1945 defeat. The Cold War and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam led to the revival of the military-industrial complex known as the “zaibatsu”, which is now, at this very moment, proceeding to eliminate the democratic rights of a cowed Japanese public.
The Pacific War of 1941-45 was therefore
a rare rupture i the historical cooperation between the hegemonic
powers of West and East. The rise of China now threatens to upset this
longstanding alliance between Washington and Tokyo, and so their joint
military forces are mobilizing at the “strategic pivot” to roll back
unwanted challenger. The fulcrum of the pivot, around which the entire
Western Pacific now turns, is the Senkaku islets, where American and
Japanese naval and air forces have a formidable strategic and tactical
advantage over the People’s Liberation Army.
Maritime Resource Rivalry
In its policy paper on the Senkaku non-dispute, Japan’s Foreign Ministry claimed that China never claimed sovereignty over the islets until oil resources were discovered in the vicinity in the late 1970s. The credibility of this claim, however, was overturned by a 2012 revelation from LDP veteran Hiromi Nonaka, an expert on security affairs, in his recollection of the late Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s unexpected query to Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai in September 1972.
Aides
from the Foreign Ministry were reportedly taken aback by Tanaka’s
off-the-cuff question to Premier Zhou about China’s position on the
islets dispute. Given the urgency to normalize relations with the US and
Japan, while negotiating for an end to the Vietnam War, the Chinese
statesman suggested a deferral of the Senkaku negotiations until the
unspecified future, according to Nonaka, who was present at that
historic summit. Foreign Ministry spokesmen have since claimed that the
diplomatic archives contain no record of this exchange, which is
certainly not the first or last time that the historical record
disappears in Tokyo.
Taiwan left out
.
Even among diehard supporters of Taiwan
independence, Beijing and not Taipei has been recognized as sovereignty
holder in the bilateral dispute. As a former LDP parliamentarian,
Shintaro Ishihara organized the Blue Wave club of Diet members who
supported Taiwan independence. In wake of the Tokyo subway gassing,
however, Ishihara resigned from the Liberal Democrats due to media
disclosures of his role in founding the Russo-Japan College, which was
run by the subway sect Aum Shinrikyo as a front for smuggling weapons of
mass destruction from a collapsing Russian economy. His close partner
in creating the doomsday sect was the late Foreign Minister Shintaro
Abe, father of the present prime minister.
Despite his verbal support for an
independent Taiwan, Ishihara never acknowledged that the Senkaku islets
or disputed Yonaguni Island were part of Taiwan, and instead focused on
opposing mainland China as the sovereign power and sworn enemy.
Ishihara’s bluster and antics on the islets have united the Chinese
worldwide as never before, a backlash with negative ramifications for
Japan’s economy as well as its diplomacy. The landing by
Hong Kong activists on the islets lends even more support for a united
Chinese claim on the Diaoyu as a part of Taiwan Province.
Maritime Markers
Today, the barren outcrops are far more important as markers for 200 nautical mile maritime economic zones, under the UN Law of the Sea, than for their land value. The countries of East Asia are vying for fishery resources and more importantly the mineral and petroleum deposits below the seafloor.
Chinese
and Korean claims to the East Asian continental shelf add up to about 1
million square kilometers of maritime area, excluding the Paracel and
Spratley archipelagos, which are disputed by Southeast Asian nations.
In contrast, Japan’s ever-expanding
Exclusive Economic Zone comprises 4.5 million square kilometers, a dozen
times larger than Japan’s landmass. While fixating the news media on
the Senkaku-Diaoyu confrontation, Tokyo has quietly laid claim to more
than 30 islands and atolls on the far ends of the North Pacific, along
with the 200-mile oceanic zone around every reef and outcrop.
Winners and Losers
The
islets conflict has also permanently harmed Japan’s chances of ever
recovering from Russia two of the four disputed islands of the South
Kurile chain, which are lush with vegetation and once inhabited by
Japanese fisher folk, who have lived in exile on Hokkaido since the
war’s end. Provoking China and South Korea, while alienating Russia,
have wrecked any hopes for regaining the Northern Territories.
The only winner in the islets
dispute is the Chinese navy, which by now has overwhelming and
unquestioning domestic support for naval modernization and fleet
expansion. Tokyo’s confrontational attitude has
resurrected painful memories of past atrocities and imperialist
arrogance during the two modern wars against China. It is just a matter
time before an aging and less agile Japan slips badly, and the Chinese
forces move in – hopefully for no more than those tiny outcrops.
If a strategic retreat is not implemented sooner than later, the Senkaku-Diaoyu dispute could rapidly escalate into the last battle of the Pacific War and the first shots fired in World War III. Diplomacy, as the art of compromise, is needed more than ever to prevent the unthinkable.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a Hong Kong-based journalist, is former editor of the Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo .
By Global Research News December 07, 2013
[SIDEBAR: The United States of America got the worst possible 'leaders' and that's because the ANGLO SAXONS took control of the education, just as Chinese have become 'educated' via the same indoctrination: CRIMINALLY INSANE.
PLEASE HUMAN BEINGS WAKE THE F UP! There are the criminally insane that are going to nuke the earth. The earth is not going to like that, again. There are too many humans attacking the earth and the earth is not exactly pleased.
All while the humans run around thinking they are owners of earth and doing this shit to our planet, well think not that the earth isn't far more intelligent than the 'human beings'. HOW MANY SPECIES DOES EARTH BIRTH?
PLEASE HUMAN BEINGS WAKE THE HELL UP!]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/107118491/Axis-of-Evil-Bush-Cheney-Rice-Et-Al
...to be continued ....
“... the “Rape of Nanking” a name given to a six week massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops ..... for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific .... “This six week carnage claimed around 300,000 lives. 20,000 women from age 8 to 70 were raped before being put to death. Pregnant women weren’t even spared. The man responsible for this atrocity is no other than Hirohito, the emperor of Japan who sent his troops to the city of Nanking. He later denied that he had anything to do with the Nanking Massacre, but this has been proven wrong with time. Many people even consider him to be the mastermind behind WW II.
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