Mr. Takeaki Matsumoto, Minister for Foreign Affairs, lodges a protest against Mr. Cheng Yonghua, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Japan

August 25, 2011
Japanese

On Thursday, August 25, Mr. Takeaki Matsumoto, Minister for Foreign Affairs, lodged a protest against Mr. Cheng Yonghua, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to Japan, regarding the entry of Chinese fishing surveillance into Japanese territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands the morning of the previous day.
Minister Matsumoto stated the following points:
(1) The Senkaku Islands are an inherent territory of Japan. The entry into the territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands and the repeated assertion of China’s own claims to the Senkaku Islands are extremely deplorable and unacceptable to Japan.

(2) Japan does not consider that the navigation of the two Chinese government vessels in Japanese territorial water as innocent passage recognized under international law, and thus the Japanese Government strongly protests the Chinese side.

(3) Japan strongly demands that an incident like this never happen again, in the light of the broad perspective of the Japan-China relationship.
In response, Ambassador Cheng stated that he will immediately report on Japan’s protest from Minister Matsumoto to his home country. He also expressed China’s own position about the Senkaku Islands, and said that China intends to cooperate with the Japanese side to forward Japan-China relations, as next year marks the 40th anniversary of the normalization of the Japan-China relations. Minister Matsumoto responded by stating the basic position of Japan on the Senkaku Islands again, indicating the importance of next year’s 40th anniversary of the normalization of the Japan-China relations, and demanding that the Chinese side prevent an incident like this from ever happening again.

(*This is a provisional translation. The above date denotes the date of the issue of the original press release in Japanese.)

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