Japan boosts maritime defenses amid PRC’s Senkaku Islands coercion

FORUM Staff

Japan is bolstering its maritime security capabilities, including increasing its Coast Guard budget and establishing a maritime group for rapid troop transportation, as the nation’s leaders condemn persistent territorial incursions by Chinese vessels.

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) coercive behavior around the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands continued recently when the Chinese coast guard confronted a Japanese research vessel surveying the uninhabited East China Sea archipelago.

The researchers from Tokyo’s Tokai University, who were joined by five Japanese legislators, including former Defense Minister Tomomi Inada, were forced to cut short their planned two-day study in late April 2024, according to media reports.

In May, the Japan Coast Guard also said four PRC ships, including one believed to be armed with an automatic cannon, patrolled Japan’s territorial waters around the islands for about two hours.

Such “unilateral attempts to change the status quo are being intensified. And this is something of a grave concern for us,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Newsweek magazine. “Japan will assert to China what needs to be asserted and respond calmly and resolutely to the situation with the determination to resolutely defend Japan’s territory as well as territorial waters and airspace.”

Japan has administered the Senkakus, which are about 170 kilometers northeast of Taiwan, since the early 1970s and bought three of the five islands from private owners in 2012.

Beijing’s territorial claims, which have no basis under international law, are tied to its economic ambitions, experts say. The area, which is near critical shipping routes, has rich fisheries and potential oil and gas reserves.

The PRC’s attempted territorial grab in the East China Sea mirrors its increasingly aggressive actions in the disputed waters of the South China Sea and its arbitrary redrawing of maps in 2023 to claim other nations’ territory. Such tactics, known as salami slicing, seek to alter the status quo via a steady progression of small coercive actions that cumulatively could force permanent change favoring Beijing, analysts say.

Chinese coast guard vessels have been a near-constant presence around the Senkakus for several years. The Japan Coast Guard said PRC vessels entered the islands’ contiguous zone — which extends from 22 to 44 kilometers off the coast — nearly every day in 2023, The Diplomat magazine reported. Overall, the Japan Coast Guard sighted about 1,300 PRC vessels in 2023, the highest figure since records began 15 years ago. On 42 occasions, Chinese coast guard ships intruded into Japan’s territorial waters by coming within 22 kilometers of the coast.

The PRC is attempting to push its territorial claims by establishing “a greater and more enduring presence of its ships in the waters around the islands,” James Brown, an associate professor of political science at Temple University’s Tokyo campus, told the broadcast network CNN.

Amid the PRC’s maneuvering, Japan is boosting its Coast Guard budget over the next three years. Tokyo’s 2024 defense budget, which increased 16.5% over 2023, also includes funding for a new maritime transportation group along with three 114-foot transports to enable rapid troop transportation in southwest Japan, which includes the Senkakus.

Meanwhile, United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently reaffirmed the U.S.’s “ironclad” commitment under the nations’ longtime alliance to defend Japan and all of its territories, including the Senkaku Islands.