Narrative of an empty space
Narrative of an empty space
Behind the row over a bunch of Pacific rocks lies the sad, magical history of Okinawa
A CLUTCH of five uninhabited islets and three rocks, cast adrift out in the currents of the Western Pacific, recently demonstrated their power to convulse East Asia. China, which (along with Taiwan) claims them, calls them the Diaoyu islands; to Japan, which controls them, they are the Senkaku islands. In September the Japanese government bought the three islets it did not already own from their private landlord. That set off a storm of protests in China, a slump in Japanese exports to China and in Chinese tourists to Japan, and incursions by Chinese vessels into the waters around the Senkakus.
In theory, ownership is straightforward. But out in the ocean, things are not so clear. The question of who the islands belong to is obscured by the fog of history, and many furlongs of water.
The Senkakus have long been known to sailors from the Okinawa chain of islands, and Okinawa is part of Japan. But Okinawa was once an independent kingdom, a peaceful place which avoided conflict with the two great powers on either side of it by paying tribute to both. And the islands' geography is as ambiguous as their history. The Senkakus are closer to Japan than to China, but they lie on the edge of China's continental shelf, just as it plummets into the Okinawa Trough, 2,300 metres (7,500 feet) at its deepest. China insists the trough proves that the continental shelves of China and Japan are not connected, and that the trough "serves as a boundary between them". Japan understands geography differently: the trough is a mere "incidental depression".
Japan's diplomats say their country "discovered" the islands in 1884. In early 1895, when the government had ascertained that the islands were terra nullius, that is, a no-man's-land controlled or claimed by no one, it annexed them. A man from Fukuoka, Tatsushiro Koga, was given leave to "develop" the islands. Koga brought in some 200 Okinawans. They processed katsuobushi—dried, smoked bonito, out of which dashi, a staple stock in Japanese cooking, is made. And they caught the short-tailed albatross, which bred there, selling the prized feathers for down. The last of Koga's employees left in 1940. (No family is so closely associated with the near-extinction of a once-abundant species.)
After Japan's defeat in the second world war, America took control of Okinawa prefecture, including the Senkaku islands, which it liked to bomb, for practice. Only in 1972 did it hand the whole lot back to Japan, which it said still had "residual sovereignty" over the Senkakus. Case closed, says Japan: there is no territorial dispute at all. Its arguments are couched in the hard, cold legal language of modern nation states. But the Japanese do not mention that in 1895 Qing China lay prostrate, defeated the previous year by an aggressive, expansionist and rapidly Westernising Japan. As part of the spoils from that war, Japan took Taiwan, a hop and a skip from the newly annexed Senkakus.
China's claims, by contrast, are redolent of the old China-centred world that shattered in 1894-95. It was a world in which status and stability in relations across Asia were regulated through a system of tributary states acknowledging Chinese centrality. Everything had its place—including the Diaoyu islands. In 1893 the Empress Dowager Cixi bestowed on a doctor in the imperial household the right to collect from them a prized medicinal herb.
Only in China would gathering sea lavender count as evidence of possession. But the Chinese also say that the Diaoyus have been part of the Chinese order since at least the Ming dynasty. They are recorded in "Voyage with a Tail Wind", published in 1403, a portolano recounting a journey from Fujian province to Ryukyu, the old name for the Okinawa chain of islands. By the following century, in "A Record of an Imperial Envoy's Visit to the Ryukyu Kingdom", Chinese names were given to all the islets in the Diaoyu group. Japanese diplomats do not bring it up, but the great Japanese military scholar, Shihei Hayashi, followed convention in giving the islands their Chinese names in his map of 1785, "A General Outline of Three Countries" (see map). He also coloured them in the same pink as China.
Hayashi's map: China below, Okinawa main island above, the Senkakus linking them
But what is so special about these damn rocks that pulls these two countries to them? It is next to impossible to get a first-hand look at the Senkaku islands. Though it denies any territorial dispute, Japan still hopes to avoid rows with China over them. The coast guard seeks to stop not only Chinese patriots but also Japanese right-wing nuts from grandstanding on the islands. They are, in effect, out of bounds, an enforced terra nullius.
Descriptions of the islands are rare. Captain Edward Belcher of HMS Samarang visited them in March 1845. They awed him. They had "the appearance of an upheaved, and subsequently ruptured mass of compact grey columnar Basalt, rising suddenly into needle-shaped pinnacles, which arc apparently ready for disintegration by the first disturbing cause, either gales of wind or earthquake." His description provided the English name: the Pinnacle group. Half a century later, the Japanese quietly took this name and fashioned out of it a Japanese one for their virgin isles: Senkaku, or "Pinnacled Pavilions".
The islands were filled with the deafening cries of breeding boobies, terns and the "Gigantic petrel", by which Belcher presumably meant the short-tailed albatross. (For an overexcited moment he thought he had rediscovered the dodo.) He also found the wrecks of junks, and the palmetto shelters of castaways.
Belcher reported a strong current washing through the islands, threatening to sweep the Samarang on to the reefs. It was the Kuroshio, the "Black Stream" in Japanese on account of its dark colour, as powerful a conveyor belt in this part of the Pacific as the Gulf Stream is in the Atlantic. Old Chinese accounts talk of the Heishuigou, a "Black Water Trench", beyond the Diaoyu islands—the Okinawa Trough. It was a liminal zone to the Chinese, an awesome threshold to be crossed: a place of high turbulence, thanks to the Kuroshio churning along the edge of the shelf. In those days it was usual for the Okinawan sailors conveying Chinese envoys to sacrifice a pig or a goat when crossing the Heishuigou.
Down in the Yaeyama islands in southern Okinawa, lush green dollops ringed by coral reefs, a tiny handful of old men know the Senkakus well. Chotaro Tamori, who is 79, and lives on tiny Iriomote, is mending his nets. When he was in his 20s, he was irresistibly drawn to the Senkakus. In those days maritime boundaries were more relaxed.
Mr Tamori loaded his wooden boat with diesel and ice and steamed for 14 hours until the pinnacles hove into view. Only when he began fishing did his intense sense of solitude fade. The waters, he recounts, were unlike anywhere else. Powerful streams met and maelstroms formed, and when you fished through them, your nets filled with skipjack, Spanish mackerel, dogtooth tuna. It was all or nothing. "Suddenly your luck turned like the tide, and your trawl was empty."
The money was good on account of the hauls, but only four or five Okinawans had the nerve to fish regularly around the Senkakus. Mr Tamori made 40 voyages. Sometimes he met Taiwanese boats (never Chinese ones). They would pass the mornings, bow to bow, exchanging stories in sign language and the broken Japanese that the older Taiwanese men had acquired during the days of the Japanese occupation.
The weather could change quickly for the worse. When he was caught out among the islands, Mr Tamori laid out three anchors in the lee of a reef and rode the storm "scared nearly to death". At other times, he would swim ashore and wander the lanes, walled in coral, that Koga's workers had made years before. Sometimes he took eggs from albatross nests.
The Senkakus, Mr Tamori insists, were part of his known Okinawan world, not beyond it. And it is true that the ambiguous history of the Okinawan chain is key to understanding why both China and Japan lay claim to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.
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