TOKYO: Japan is sending 100 soldiers and radar to its westernmost outpost, a tropical island off Taiwan, in a deployment that risks angering China with ties between Asia’s biggest economies already hurt by a dispute over nearby islands they both claim.
Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera will break ground today for a military lookout station on Yonaguni, which is home to 1,500 people and just 150km from the disputed Japanese-held islands claimed by China.
The mini-militarisation of Yonaguni — now defended by two police officers — is part of a longstanding plan to improve defence and surveillance in Japan’s far-flung frontier.
Building the radar base on the island, which is much closer to China than to Japan’s main islands, could extend Japanese monitoring to the Chinese mainland and track Chinese ships and aircraft circling the disputed crags, called the Senkaku by Japan and the Diaoyu by China.
“We decided to deploy a Ground Self-Defence Force unit on Yonaguni Island as a part of our effort to strengthen the surveillance over the southwestern region,” Onodera said this week. “We are staunchly determined to protect Yonaguni Island, a part of the precious Japanese territory.”
The 30sqkm backwater — known for strong rice liquor, cattle, sugar cane and scuba diving — may seem an unlikely place for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to put boots on the ground.
But Yonaguni marks the confluence of the Japanese defence establishment’s concerns about the vulnerability of the country’s thousands of islands and the perceived threat from China.
The new base “should give Japan the ability to expand surveillance to near the Chinese mainland,” said Heigo Sato, a professor at Takushoku University and a former researcher at the Defense Ministry’s National Institute for Defence Studies.
Reuters
