By PAUL KALLENDER-UMEZU
TOKYO — With a high-profile groundbreaking ceremony for a small radar station on Yonaguni Island, Japan has drawn a line in the sand about its strategic intent to defend its Nansei Shoto (southwestern island chain) against China, effectively telling Beijing to back off.
The deployment of the “coastal observation unit,” as the Defense Ministry here calls it, will see the deployment of only about 100 troops on a 60-acre site during 2015. But the April 19 groundbreaking ceremony, which included Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera, was the top news in newspapers and for the state broadcaster, quite an event for the 11-square-mile subtropical island, population 1,500, hitherto known for its sugar cane production and scuba diving.
Politics and positioning are behind the fanfare for the event, said Masaaki Gabe, professor of international relations and director of the International Institute for Okinawan Studies at the University of the Ryukyus. Yonaguni is only 67 miles east of Taiwan and 93 miles south of the Senkaku Islands, a major source of friction between Japan and China.
Planting boots on an island at the very extremity of Japanese territory — effectively China’s backyard — makes great public relations domestically for the nationalist administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, serving notice of Japan’s determination to push back against China, he said.
“The radar base [set up] by the Ground Self-Defense Forces [GSDF] is not strategically military important now, but politically, it’s extremely important to the Abe administration,” he said.
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