While Japan’s opposition parties and media focus on trivial domestic scandals, China has steadily increased incursions into the Senkaku waters and eroded Japan’s administrative control. This essay highlights expert warnings from Washington that Japan now faces an escalating national crisis.

March 12, 2017

Opposition parties, the Asahi Shimbun, and so-called cultural figures who echo them are making a truly foolish uproar over Toyosu and Toyonaka, treating them as if they were major national crises.
Meanwhile, there is the reality that a nation of bottomless evil and plausible lies has now erected a so-called comfort women statue in Germany for the first time in Europe.
There is also the reality that the Chinese Communist Party’s persistent and vicious intent to establish de facto control over the Senkaku Islands has become increasingly evident.
Ignoring these realities, opposition parties, media outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun, and the cultural figures who align with them are making a great fuss over the Toyosu issue, where it is clear that there is scientifically no problem and where the investigation that triggered the uproar was in fact intentionally fabricated.
They are also raising an outcry over the sale price of land in Toyonaka and Noda that contains massive soil contamination underground, and over the fact that a private company attempted to establish a private elementary school.
If one believes that these matters have nothing whatsoever to do with the two international situations described above, that belief is not only an extremely naïve attitude toward the realities of Chinese and South Korean intelligence agencies,
but means that, like the opposition parties, the Asahi Shimbun, and the cultural figures aligned with them,
you too are being manipulated by them.
When I read Yoshihisa Komori’s serialized column “America Note” on page 3 of today’s Sankei Shimbun, I felt more than mere coincidence in the fact that, the day after introducing the genuine and serious essay by former Air Self-Defense Force General Oda, a genuine journalist like Komori conveyed from the United States a message that resonated so precisely.
North Korea is not the only imminent threat.
“Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to defend the Senkaku Islands, China has increased its intrusions into the Senkaku waters and has succeeded in eroding Japan’s administrative control.
If this continues, China could declare shared administration of the Senkakus, and the crisis for Japan can be said to be intensifying.”
These words were spoken calmly by Toshi Yoshihara, regarded as one of the leading authorities in the United States on China’s maritime strategy.
They were spoken on March 7 at the offices of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a major defense think tank located near the White House in central Washington.
Yoshihara has long served as a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and as a researcher at its China Maritime Studies Institute, and earlier this year became a senior fellow at the bipartisan private institution CSBA.
A Japanese American whose mother is from Taiwan and who was raised there until his youth, he is fluent in Chinese and conducts frequent exchanges with Chinese military officials in their own language.
In Japan, there seems to be a strong sense that the Senkaku crisis has subsided.
This is likely because President Trump and senior officials including the secretaries of state and defense have all stated their commitment to defense support.
However, Yoshihara warns that China has once again significantly intensified its offensive over the Senkakus, and that the crisis for Japan has in fact grown more severe.
“The Chinese coast guard fleets entering the Senkaku waters were composed of two ships until around the middle of last year, but have increased to four ships, and this has not changed even after the advent of the Trump administration.
At present, they intrude into Japan’s territorial waters or contiguous zone around the Senkakus an average of three to four times a month, and have almost acquired the capability to patrol the Senkaku waters constantly and freely.
This means that China is approaching a state where it can declare that administrative control over the Senkakus is already in its hands, even if only unilaterally.”
Yoshihara further pointed out that not only is the number of armed Chinese coast guard vessels increasing, but that each vessel is becoming larger and more advanced.
If this trend continues, China will almost certainly prevail in a war of attrition against Japan’s Coast Guard patrol vessels.
What, then, should Japan do when that happens.
There will be no frontal military attack on the Senkakus, and therefore Japan cannot rely on the United States.
It can be said that a national crisis is already just around the corner.
This series continues.