Thinking about Japan's Territorial Disputes

Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.17 No.2 © 2017 Academy of East Asian Studies. 149-162 DOI: 10.21866/esjeas.2017.17.2.002 email of the author: alexis.dudden@uwnn.edu 149 Introduction In August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s total defeat in the wake of America’s nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing decimation of over sixty other major Japanese cities, and the near annihilation of the Ryukyu Islands in the East China Sea (more commonly known as Okinawa). Equally important, Russia abrogated its neutrality pact with Japan, and Soviet troops were overwhelming Japanese soldiers and settlers in the northern reaches of the nation’s empire in Manchuria, northern Korea, southern Sakhalin Island, and the Kuril Islands. Only three years earlier—the moment of the height of the Japanese empire—the territory that was under Tokyo’s control stretched from the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska in the northern Pacific all the way south through the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands, arching just above Australia through New Guinea and Indonesia, heading north again through Burma (now Myanmar), and including much of coastal and central China and the northern Manchurian region before heading east again through Korea back to Japan proper. Significantly, Japan controlled the Pacific Ocean space therein, making it, as historian William Tsutsui has explained, very much a “pelagic empire,” too (Tsutsui 2013, 21−38). To accomplish the capture of so much of the planet’s surface area meant that state planners and their agents—Japanese subjects by birth and colonized people as well—had directed an extremely rapid transformation of spaces and beings during Japan has territorial disputes with each of its international neighbors in the form of sovereignty contests over small islands that are shards of its once vast mid-twentieth century empire. In the meantime, recently emerging global ocean laws have taken root that urge some nationalists to take a maximalist approach to defining the space of their respective countries, although these same laws allow for more flexible approaches as well. In the past two decades, Japanese leaders have made clear that they are committed to national policies and planning that re-orient Japan again as a maritime nation. Moving forward, therefore, is the question of whether Japanese leaders will adopt a rigid definition for Japan or a more fluid one that emphasizes borderlines in the sea around