Japan’s foreign minister appealed for calm in dealing with “pending issues” in relations between Taiwan and Japan on Friday to prevent the worsening of bilateral ties, an academic said yesterday.
“Japan’s statement was made to head off the emergence of overt anti-Japanese sentiment in Taiwan and for the personal safety of Japanese nationals and tourists in Taiwan,” said Ho Szu-shen (何思慎), a Japanese professor at Fu Jen Catholic University.
He was referring to a statement made by Japan’s Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba through its de facto embassy that called for calm in dealing with “pending issues” and rational communication and urged that bilateral ties not be affected by “isolated problems.”
Although the statement did not mention the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) explicitly, the statement was clearly addressing mounting tensions between Taiwan and Japan over the islet chain, which both countries claim as their territory.
Meanwhile, Liou To-hai (劉德海), a professor of diplomacy at National Chengchi University, said Japan’s description of the dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands as “a pending issue” could be seen as a “concession in tone.”
Liou said the phrasing showed that Japan, which is in an advantageous position in the Diaoyutais dispute, indicated a more moderate approach toward Taiwan than toward China.
The approach can be seen as “conciliatory” and “as a strategy to prevent both sides of the Taiwan Strait from joining hands to deal with the Diaoyutais spat,” Liou said.
He suggested that Gemba is not likely to use the same phrase to describe Japan’s spat with China over the Diaoyutais, but said that if Gemba did call the spat a “pending issue,” it would represent a bid to find a way out of the problem.
In related developments, a group of Taiwanese Diaoyutais activists, joined by several academics and activists from South Korea, China and Japan, yesterday published a statement as they attended a roundtable forum in Taipei on the disputes over the Diaoyutais and over the contested islands known to Japan as Takeshima and to South Korea as Dokdo.
They said the disputes stemmed not only from competing claims of sovereignty, but also from strengthening military deployment of the US in the East China Sea on the pretext of the anxiety of neighboring countries toward the “so-called ‘rise’ of China.”
They called for the disputed islands be transformed into a “sphere of border interaction” and the East China Sea to be demilitarized, urging respective governments to soothe nationalist sentiment within its borders and check their militaristic tendencies when facing the disputes.
They voiced support for people in Okinawa and South Korea against US military bases and promoted the idea that each government signs a pact for regional peace and security to fully resolve the problem of US bases in East Asia.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift