Island is gone and no one noticed
ONE OF JAPAN’S SMALL UNINHABITED ISLANDS QUIETLY WENT UNDER WATER AND OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO FIND IT
Japan has a lot of uninhabited islands, about 158 of which the government named in 2014 to ensure that the water around them continues to belong to Japan.
But now, one of those islets has disappeared, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported. And no one seemed to notice until now.
The Japanese Coast Guard is apparently planning to search for the is let, called Es an be han a kit akoji ma, about half a kilometre away from Sarufutsu, a village on Hokkaido island.
Hiroshi Shimizu, an author who published a picture book about Japanese islands, was the one who reported that the islet wasn’t where it’s supposed to be. He wanted to visit Esanbehanakitakojima as part of a follow-up book project, but the Japanese newspaper reported that he just couldn’t find it. That’s when he reached out to Sarufutsu’s village fishery to ask where it might be.
Territorial disputes
It turns out the Japanese Coast Guard had last surveyed the islet in 1987, and it was known to be around 1.2 metres above sea level. But now it can’t be seen from land at all.
“There is a possibility that the islet has been eroded by wind and snow and, as a result, disappeared,” senior coast guard official Tomoo Fujii told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
A coast guard official said that the disappearance “may affect Japan’s territorial waters a tiny bit … if you conduct precision surveys.”
Land disappearances are not unheard of. A study published in Environmental Research Letters in 2016, for example, found that five reef islands in the Pacific Ocean’s Solomon Islands had disappeared between 1947 and 2014. That study determined that although sea-level rise has caused erosion in the central Pacific, research in the western Pacific found that “extreme events, seawalls and inappropriate development” were likely responsible for the majority of shoreline changes in that region.
For its part, Japan has taken measures to ensure it lays claim to certain islands to avoid further territorial disputes with its neighbours. In 2016, Japan announced it would spend $107 million (Dh392 million) to rebuild the observatory tower on a Pacific island called Okinotorishima, about 1,600 kilometres south of the Tokyo.
At the time, Beijing had claimed the island was made of only rocks and thus disqualified Japan from including it in its exclusive economic zone. A United Nations convention claimed that “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own” don’t qualify for such a zone.
An official said the disappearance “may affect Japan’s territorial waters a bit ... if you conduct precision surveys.”