7 - The Nature of the Senkaku Islands

Summary

In 2013 China Central Television aired a news bulletin with a provocative headline: ‘Japan is snatching our islands using the pretext of environmental protection!’ This fiery denunciation was a reaction to the announcement by the Yamashina Institute that a new variant of Steller’s albatross had been discovered nesting on the disputed Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Islands. Might this accusation by Chinese state media might have a kernel of truth to it? This chapter begins by exploring the politics of heritage preservation in Okinawa under US occupation, before showing how nature conservation on the Senkaku became tangled up in the sovereignty dispute over the islands in the 1960s. Shortly before Okinawan reversion to Japan, the naturalist Takara Tetsuo helped stoke a nationwide panic about Taiwanese fishermen ‘poaching’ seabird eggs on the Senkakus. Later, in the early 2010s, Japanese nationalists led by Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō used nature conservation as a pretext to lobby the central government to take harder line on the dispute.