Japanese activists raised flags early Sunday on Uotsuri Island, part of the small archipelago known in Japan as Senkaku and in China as Diaoyu.
HONG KONG — The Hong Kong-based group that triggered heightened tensions between China and Japan by sailing to a disputed island last Wednesday plans to try to keep the issue in the news by seeking to organize protests outside Japanese embassies and consulates around the world on Sept. 18, a representative of the group said on Monday.
- [h=6]IHT Rendezvous: Simmering Chinese Anger at Japan Is Now on the Boil (August 20, 2012)[/h]
- [h=6]Anti-Japan Protests Erupt in China Over Disputed Island (August 20, 2012)[/h]
[h=6]Associated Press[/h]Thousands of protesters turned out in Chengdu, China, on Sunday in response to Japanese activists landing on a disputed island in the South China Sea.
[h=6]The New York Times[/h]Confrontations between Japan and China on or near the contested islands have the potential to become larger international incidents.
[h=6]Alexander F. Yuan/Associated Press[/h]An anti-Japan protester raised a fist during a protest outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Sunday.
A boatload of 14 activists from the group, the Action Committee for Defending the Diaoyu Islands, reached the largest of the islands, Uotsuri, last Wednesday, and were quickly detained and then deported on Friday by the Japanese authorities. The Japanese action led to protests in Chinese cities over the weekend, and a second landing by Japanese activists on the same island on Sunday morning may cause further frictions.
Japan rejected China’s protests on Monday but sought to sound a conciliatory note, emphasizing the high priority it places on the relationship between the two countries. Osamu Fujimura, the chief cabinet secretary, was quoted by news agencies as telling reporters in Tokyo that “the Japan-China relationship is one of the most important bilateral ties for Japan.”
The Chinese government was largely silent on Monday about the islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan. But the Foreign Ministry had criticized Japan on Sunday for allowing the Japanese activists on the island, and state-controlled media in China took strongly nationalistic positions regarding the islands on Monday.
David Ko, a fund-raiser and spokesman for the Action Committee, said that the group had chosen Sept. 18 for further protests because it is the 81st anniversary of the Manchurian Incident. The incident, a staged bombing of a train track, was used by the Japanese government as a pretext for invading northeast China the following day in 1931, triggering 14 years of warfare that caused enormous numbers of Chinese military and civilian deaths and other suffering.
Mr. Ko said that the committee’s goal was to urge ethnic Chinese all over the world — not just in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong — to join protests. The island dispute has been mostly an issue in east Asia, however, and it is unclear how much overseas Chinese care about it.
The mainland Chinese protest over the weekend that drew the most attention took place in Shenzhen, where demonstrators turned over a Japanese-brand police vehicle, a Honda CR-V. But Huang Yi, the chairman and executive director of the Zhongsheng Group, which is China’s fifth-largest car dealership chain and the largest seller of Toyota, Nissan and Lexus vehicles in China, said that there had been no sign yet of a drop in sales of Japanese-brand cars in China following the disputes of the past few days.
Ge Wenda, the head of corporate finance at Zhongsheng, said that previous rounds of tension between China and Japan, which have included particularly acrimonious confrontations in 2005 and 2010, had sometimes hurt sales for a day or two. But the spillover effects on car purchases from anti-Japanese sentiment have not lasted long enough even to affect monthly sales totals, much less quarterly or annual results, he said.
When Japan deported the 14 activists from the Action Committee on Friday, it sent seven back to Hong Kong by plane and had the rest sail back in the fishing boat in which they had come. The fishing boat was supposed to arrive by midday on Tuesday, but has encountered mechanical difficulties and is now not expected back until some time on Wednesday, Mr. Ko said.
Mr. Ko said that his group had no evidence that the Japanese had damaged the vessel, but would inspect it on arrival. “The boat itself is rather old, but surely they must have touched it, and the boat was slammed on both sides by Japanese military vessels,” he said, referring to the Coast Guard vessels that had detained the boat.
