Japan wants answers over Chinese buoy found in remote contested waters

The buoy was discovered last week near Okinotorishima, a tiny remote atoll 1,730km south of Tokyo and the southernmost feature claimed by Japan. Though China and other have argued that the coral reef does not qualify as an island under UN definitions, Japan insists it can use the outpost to extend its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

“It is regrettable that a buoy was placed without providing details of its purpose,” Tokyo’s top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Friday, vowing that Japanese authorities would closely monitor the situation.

Experts say the dispute over Okinotorishima underscores the broader challenges Asian nations face in defining and defending their maritime boundaries in an era of growing competition over strategic waterways and resources.

“Japan is ticked off about this, but there is an argument that it does not have a particularly strong case,” said James Brown, an international-relations professor at Temple University’s Tokyo campus.

He pointed out that a nation’s EEZ is not sovereign territory, but rather an area off its coast where it has exclusive rights to economic activities.

“But others are free to enter those waters and, by some interpretations, other countries are even able to carry out military exercises in those waters, for example,” he said.

The debate centres around whether Japan can claim the waters 370km in every direction around Okinotorishima as its EEZ. The tiny atoll is largely submerged at high tide, with only two small islets measuring just 9.4 square metres remaining above the water line – and even those were built up with concrete by Japan, Brown told This Week in Asia.

“This is not an island by any stretch of the imagination, and when Japan criticises China for building on