Last weekend, angry young protesters in China and Japan took to the streets to demonstrate to the international community their countries' claims over what Tokyo calls the Senkaku Islands and Beijing refers to as the Diaoyu.
One of the sides must be wrong, historically. But which side? Each government, of course, says it has the better claim.
The mainland Chinese government and state-controlled media say the uninhabited islets in the East China Sea have belonged to China since ancient times, going as far back as the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). They also say Japan "stole" the islets together with Taiwan in the closing days of the first Sino-Japanese War (August 1894 to March 1895) in which Japan was victorious, critically weakening the already ailing Qing Dynasty.
Meanwhile, the Japanese government and a majority of academic experts in Japan argue there is no evidence showing China had control over the Senkakus in ancient times. The islets were featured in ancient Chinese maps and documents probably as landmarks for maritime journeys, they say.
The academic debates over interpretations of ancients maps and documents appear endless and highly technical, in particular to those unable to read the original texts in Japanese or Chinese.
Japanese scholars say Beijing is staking its claim on "history in hindsight," and a number of sources show that China, at least officially, didn't recognize the islets as part of its territory prior to the 1970s.
Beijing and Taipei officially started claiming the islands in 1971 — 76 years after Japan incorporated them in 1895. Their claim came after a group of scientists under a United Nations commission reported in May 1969 that one of the world's largest oil and gas reserves could exist under the seafloor near the Senkakus.
"China started claiming the Senkakus in the race for oil resources. Until then, China hadn't said anything about the islets," said Kentaro Serita, a professor of international law at the graduate school of Aichi Gakuin University.
China and Taiwan have demanded Japan return the Senkakus based on the 1943 Cairo Declaration, which Japan accepted in 1945 when it signed the Potsdam Declaration to end Japan's war with China and the war in the Pacific.
The Cairo Declaration, jointly issued by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China, stated "Japan shall be stripped of" all the territories it had "stolen from the Chinese," including Manchuria, Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands.
The Japan Times
