Chinese ships in waters off disputed isles with Japan

TOKYO—Chinese government ships were back in waters around Japanese-controlled islands on Tuesday, the coast guard said, a week after they last left and days after heated exchanges at the UN General Assembly.

The four maritime surveillance ships entered the waters shortly after 12:30 p.m., Japan’s coast guard said in a statement, adding that it was telling the ships to leave the area.

“Patrol ships from our agency have been telling them to sail outside of our territorial waters. There has not been any response” from the Chinese ships, the agency said.

Two other Chinese official vessels were sailing near the island chain, but not in what Japan claims as its territorial waters, the coast guard also reported in a separate statement.

It was the first time in about a week that Chinese ships had entered the waters, and came after a lull in a fearsome diplomatic spat over the sovereignty of the islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Official Chinese vessels repeatedly sailed into the archipelago’s waters until last Monday, defying warnings from Japan’s wellequipped coast guard.

And last week, Chinese and Japanese diplomats at the United Nations in New York traded insults, with China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi accusing Japan of theft.

The islands lie in rich fishing grounds and on key shipping lanes. The seabed in the area is also believed to harbor mineral reserves.

Japan’s deputy UN ambassador Kazuo Kodama retorted that the islands were legally Japanese territory and said “an assertion that Japan took the islands from China cannot logically stand.”

Historical grievances stemming from Japan’s wartime expansionism also complicate the argument, as does a claim of ownership by Taiwan.

That claim was pressed last Tuesday when dozens of fishing boats were escorted into island waters by the Taiwanese coast guard, sparking water cannon exchanges with Japanese coast guard vessels.

The decades-old dispute came to the fore earlier this year when the China-baiting governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, announced he wanted to buy the island chain from its private Japanese landowner.

Nationalists from both sides staged island landings before Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda stepped in to outbid Ishihara, who had amassed well over a billion yen ($12.8 million) in public donations toward the cost.

The government completed its purchase of three of the five islands in the chain—it already owned one and leases the fifth—on Sept. 11.

Observers said Noda’s move to nationalize the islands had been an attempt to hose down an issue that looked set to become an international problem.

But Beijing reacted furiously and unleashed diplomatic vitriol on Tokyo, while tens of thousands of protesters poured onto streets in cities across China.