Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia

Mikyoung Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415835138
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135009205
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Social Sciences

Decades after the end of the World War II East Asia continues to struggle with lingering animosities and unresolved historical grievances in domestic, bilateral and regional memory landscapes. China, Japan and the Korea share a history of inter- and intra-violence, self-other identity construction and diametrically opposed interpretations of the past.

Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia offers a complete overview of the challenges of national memory and ideological rivalry for reconciliation in the East Asian region. Chapters provide authoritative analyses of contentious issues such as comfort women, the Nanjing massacre, history textbook controversies, shared heritage sites, colonial rule, territorial disputes and restitution. By interweaving memory, human rights and reconciliation the contributors actively explore real prospects of redressing past wrongs and achieving peaceful coexistence at personal as well as governmental levels.

Bringing together an international team of experts, this book is an essential read for students and scholars of East Asian studies, anthropology, gender studies, history, international relations, law, political science, and sociology, and for those interested in memory and reconciliation issues.

SCTION IIBilateral conflicts and lessons for reconciliation

PART 4 China-Japan relations

11 Troubled SeasJapan's Pacific and East China Sea domains and claims

Gavan McCormack

DOI: 10.4324/9780203740323-11

Introduction: Dividing up the oceans and the Pacific

“Modern” history has been the history of states and empires, and the lands they controlled and exploited, with the sea (save for a narrow coastal strip) the site of battles for its control but never the property of any state. That is no longer the case. Under the 1982 (UNCLOS) United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Third Convention, much of the “high” seas was divided up and allocated to nation states in the form of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) over which states enjoyed special rights akin to resources ownership to a distance of 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) beyond their 22 kilometre (12 mile) territorial waters, and even further, to a limit of 350 nautical miles (650 kilometres) in the event of the outer reaches of the continental shelf being shown to extend so far. It was a decision that drastically shrank the global “high seas” and privileged countries that had the good fortune to possess substantial sea frontage or far-flung islands, including especially former imperial powers, notably France and the United Kingdom, which emerged with their advantages confirmed and reinforced by their possession of far-flung islands left behind by the waves of decolonization.

The 1982 agreement took almost a decade in the making (1973–1982), took another decade before coming into force, in 1994, was ratified by Japan in 1996, and by 2011 had been adopted by 162 countries. It aimed to set international standards and principles for protection of the marine wildlife and environment and provide a forum for resolution of disputes over boundaries and resource ownership. It gave coastal nations jurisdiction over approximately 38 million square nautical miles of ocean, which are “estimated to contain about 87 per cent of all of the known and estimated hydro-carbon reserves as well as almost all offshore mineral resources” and almost 99 per cent of the world's fisheries (Hollis et al 2010). Island territories till then of little significance save as navigational points or colonial outposts came to assume large significance. The United States, though participating in the various conferences since 1982 and claiming the largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,351,000 square kilometers in three oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea, is one of the few that has not ratified the agreement, evidently in keeping with the reluctance to compromise US exceptionalism by submitting to the authority of any international law.¹

The great beneficiaries have been the US, UK, and France, together with Australia, New Zealand and Russia, followed closely by Japan (Nolan 2013:77–95). China, convulsed at the time by imperialist assaults and domestic confusion, played no part in the 19th and 20th century processes of dividing up the Pacific land territories and plays none now in dividing up its ocean (Nolan 2013: passim). China's coastline, at 14,500 kilometres, slightly less than half Japan's 29,020 kilometres (CIA 2008), carries relatively small ocean entitlement and, for major sections, abuts the EEZ's of neighbour states including Japan and South Korea and enjoys direct Pacific frontage only via Taiwan. Japan controls a five times greater swathe of ocean, ranking at number six (in terms of area of EEZ), or by recent estimates that consider the actual volume of water, i.e., ocean depth, number 4 (Yamada 2011). Ironically, while public attention focuses on the grab China is supposedly making for ocean territory and resources in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the far greater claims made by the club of advanced countries including Japan under the 1982 UNCLOS disposition for the most part escape attention.

The following map (Figure 11.1) shows the pattern of maritime appropriation across the Western Pacific and well illustrates the importance of the EEZs, the shrinkage of “open sea,” and (from a Chinese viewpoint) the growing threat of potential blockage of access to the Pacific as hostile or potentially hostile forces spread their EEZ wings over so much of it. Commonly denounced for its claims to islands, reefs and shoals in the South China Sea, set in global terms China is a minor player in its claims on world oceans. On the other hand, Japan's maritime territorial claims, i.e., beyond its main islands and their surrounds, centre on two zones, one in the Pacific and Philippine Sea that for administrative purposes constitutes part of the Metropolis of Tokyo, and the other in the East China Sea zone surrounding the islands known in Japan as Senkaku, and in China and Taiwan as Diaoyudao and Diaoyutai respectively (hereafter: Diaoyu).

Figure 11.1 Western Pacific EEZs

Japan-Island Country and Tokyo – Island City

Tokyo is unquestionably one of the world's largest metropolises, Japan's national capital and home to more than 30 million people. It is also an island city whose domain extends over great swathes of the Pacific. Its jurisdiction extends to a maximum of almost 2,000 kilometres into the Pacific, including first seven volcanic islands known as the Izu Islands that sprinkle the ocean beyond the Izu peninsula, the Ogasawara island group beyond that and approximately 1,000 kilometres from Tokyo, and two small but hugely important rocky outcrops: Okinotorishima, 1,740 kilometres southwest from Tokyo and Minami Torishima, 1,848 kilometres from Tokyo. The former is Japan's most southerly and the latter its most easterly territory. In April 2012, Governor Ishihara Shintaro proposed extending that domain by approximately 1,900 kilometres to the southwest to include the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (transferring them from nominally private ownership to his Metropolis), but that initiative was soon pre-empted as three of those islands were “bought” and “nationalized” by Japan's Noda government in September 2012 (on which, see Table 11.1).

Apart from the Izu islands, whose links with pre-modern Japan were strong, Japan's claim to the others is relatively recent. Ogasawara village, which is administratively part of Tokyo City, extends far across the seas. The islands (sometimes also known as the Bonin Islands) were first formally claimed by Japan and a Japanese flag was raised over them in 1862. Ogasawara “village” includes its core component, the Ogasawara archipelago, together with the Volcano Island group and several tiny outcrops. The Ogasawara Archipelago itself comprises three sub-groups known as Chichijima (Father), Hahajima (Mother), and Mukojima (Bridegroom) Archipelagos and currently accessible only by the weekly steamer service from Tokyo to Chichijima that takes about 26 hours. The communities on Chichijima and Hahajima number around 2,400 people (Guo and McCormack 2005). One hundred forty-eight kilometres to the southwest of these extended family island group lies the Kazan (Volcano) Island archipelago, comprising also three small islands, the central one, Ioto (formerly Iwojima, site of fierce fighting in 1945) being 1,200 kilometres from Tokyo, just 21 square kilometres in area, and home only to a small Self-Defence Force base, while to its north and south, across a 137 kilometres stretch of ocean, lie North and South (Kita and Minami) Ioto, neither of them populated and with a combined area of approximately seven square kilometres (Wikipedia 2012b).² The Kazan Island group also includes a small barren active caldera, Nishinoshima, with elevation of 38 metres and area about 22 hectares but growing since 1973 because of the ongoing eruption. To the southeast of this volcano group, just six hundred kilometers distant, lie the American territories of the Mariana Islands.

Table 11 Tokyo's island territories

Administrative Unit	Incorporationin Japan	Area	Population
Ogasawara Village	1862
Ogasawara Archipelago (Chichijima, Hahajima, Mukojima)		73 kms^2	2,400^a
Kazan (Volcano) Archipelago		22.3 kms^2
(Ioto, Kita and Minami Ioto)			None^b
Minami Torishima (Marcus Island)	1898	1.2 kms^2	None^c
Okinotorishima (Parece Vela)	1931	10 m^2	None

a2,000 on Chichijima and about 400 on Hahajima bNo civil population but a Maritime Self-Defence Force base and site of US carrier-based fighter flight training cNo civil population but site of weather station and ancillary facilities

Within the Ogasawara Village administrative unit are included also two tiny territories whose value was suddenly and enormously enhanced by the UN decision: Minami Torishima and Okinotorishima. Minami Torishima, 1,848 kilometres southeast of Tokyo, also sometimes known as Marcus Island, is an outcrop with a surface area of 1.2 square kilometres. Annexed by Japan in 1898, today it hosts only a weather station and small airport, with no civilian population. Okinotorishima consists just of two outcrops of coral reef in the Philippine Sea with a total area of about 10 square meters, shrinking at high tide so that one is about the size of a double bed and the other a small room, at an elevation of around 7.4 centimetres above the sea surface. The Japanese claim to it, based on the terra nullius (literally “no man's land”) principle, i.e., as being unclaimed by any other state, was first advanced in 1931. Once the implications of the UN decision were understood, from 1987 Tokyo City began investing heavily in the building of “steel breakwaters and concrete walls” designed to shore the reef up and prevent it disappearing (Yoshikawa 2007). After investigations commissioned in 2004 and 2005 by the Nippon (formerly Sasakawa) Foundation, Ishihara's Tokyo adopted plans for the construction of a lighthouse and building of port infrastructure, a power generation plant, housing, etc. (Yoshikawa 2007). A very considerable sum, estimated at $600 million, has been laid out on concrete and titanium to date as part of Tokyo's mission to retain Okinotorshima and a surrounding EEZ (Wikipedia 2012c).

These far-flung archipelagos and reefs known collectively as “Ogasawara” were occupied by the United States in 1945 and returned to Japan in 1968. In the interim, they were used, inter alia, for stockpiling nuclear weapons. In 2011 UNESCO recognized the ecological significance of the Ogasawara islands by designating them a World Heritage Site.

While Ogasawara Village and its various outlying island territories constitute, administratively, part of Tokyo Metropolis, as the EEZ map above illustrates there is also one additional island group, not part of Tokyo, which carries significant EEZ entitlement and deserves mention here. The Daito (Daitoshima) group, about 350 kilometres east of Okinawa's main island, comprises the three islands of North Daito, South Daito and Daito (12.7, 30.5, and 1.1 square kilometres respectively, with populations of 700, 1,400 and 0). Administratively, they form part of Okinawa prefecture and though tiny, with their surrounding EEZ they too account for a large area of ocean. Daito Island itself is unoccupied because it has been a US Navy firing range since 1956 and it may be assumed that little life survives on it.

Islands? Rocks?

The question, under UNCLOS, is whether all such territories qualify, strictly speaking, as islands, which carry the EEZ entitlement. An “island,” according to Article 121 of the Convention, is a “naturally framed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” The law spells out that “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no economic zone or continental shelf.” Under such provisions, there seems no reason to doubt the claims on behalf of the Ogasawara and Kazan archipelagos, or the Daito islands. Some doubt might be raised as to Minami Torishima on the point of whether it could really “sustain human habitation or economic life,” but so far as Okinotorishima is concerned, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the claims by Japan, and the Tokyo Metropolis, stretch the law to breaking-point. Okinotorishima has never sustained any kind of economic life and is only kept above sea level by dint of considerable effort and expense. Yet both the Government of Japan and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government insist otherwise and base large ocean claims upon that proposition (Tokyo Metropolis 2012).

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson in 2005 explained:

The island [Okinotorishima], under the Tokyo Municipal Government, has been known as an island under Japanese jurisdiction since 1931, long before the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into existence. Having ratified the Convention in 1996, Japan registered its domestic laws concerning its territorial waters, in which Okinotorishima is included as an island, to the Secretary-General of the UN in 1997 … Article 121 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines that ‘an island is a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.’ This is exactly what Okinotorishima is.

(Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2005)

The disproportion between the scale of the “island” and the breadth of sea ent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front-Other Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Memory and reconciliation in East Asia
• SECTION I Domestic trauma and prospects of reconciliation
• SECTION II Bilateral conflicts and lessons for reconciliation
• SECTION III East Asia’s challenges and prospects of reconciliation
• Index