Tokyo Residents Donate $1 Million To Buy Disputed Islands
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Tokyo’s city government has raised nearly $1 million from its citizens in order to buy a small chain of islands in the East China Sea, which have been at the centre of a territorial dispute between the Japanese and Chinese government.
The Senkaku Islands – also known as Diaoyutai in China – is a group of uninhabited islands located about 140km away from the east of Pengjia Islet in China, and about 170km north of Ishigaki Island, Japan. Since 1971, ownership of the islands have been a hotly contested dispute between Japan, China and Taiwan.
Tokyo’s city government has raised nearly $1 million from its citizens in order to buy a small chain of islands in the East China Sea, which have been at the centre of a territorial dispute between the Japanese and Chinese government.
The Senkaku Islands – also known as Diaoyutai in China – is a group of uninhabited islands located about 140km away from the east of Pengjia Islet in China, and about 170km north of Ishigaki Island, Japan. Since 1971, ownership of the islands have been a hotly contested dispute between Japan, China and Taiwan.
Presently, the central Japanese government prevents private citizens from landing on the islands in order to avoid conflict with Beijing. Still three of the islands in the group – Uotsurijima, Kitakojima and Minamikojima – are owned by a Japanese family who could sell them off once its lease with the Japanese government expires next march.
Consequently, Tokyo’s city governor Shintaro Ishihara, an outspoken critic of Beijing, has tried to drum up funds in order to purchase the three islands from their owners.
Ishihara’s government say they has thus far pulled in about 76 million yen ($947,000) in public donations since they began fundraising last Friday.
[quote]”We will continue the fundraising campaign for the time being,” said a Tokyo government official to AFP. “This is a matter of peoples’ will, not really a matter of how much we collect.”[/quote]Ishihara has already vowed to defend the islands if he is successful with the purchase. Little is known about how much the islands would cost, though Ishihara has said that they would not be “too expensive.”
Even the islands’ owners do not appear to know the true value of the islands.
“We have no idea. There’s no reference value,” told Hiroyuki Kurihara, whose descendants bought the islands decades ago, to the Financial Times.
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It is not known how the Chinese government will react to this latest news. In 2010 though, a clash occurred between a Chinese fishing boat and Japanese coastguard vessels, which disrupted diplomatic and economic exchanges for months.
[quote]“Japan should play down the Senkaku dispute with China, as any efforts to raise the profile of the issue further will only make Beijing more vocal in its erroneous territorial claims,” wrote the Nikkei Weekly in a recent editorial.[/quote]
