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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Okinawan naturalists have campaigned to protect biodiversity on the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands since the end of World War II. It shows how concerns to protect nature have mingled with anxiety to demarcate the islands as part of the post-imperial Japanese body politic.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 China Central Television aired a news bulletin with a provocative headline: ‘Japan is snatching our islands using the pretext of environmental protection!' This fiery denunciation was a reaction to an announcement by the Yamashina Institute, a conservation NGO with close links to the Japanese royal family, that a new variant of albatross had been discovered nesting on the disputed Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Islands. Might this accusation by Chinese state media might have a kernel of truth to it?

This paper begins by exploring the politics of heritage preservation in Okinawa under US occupation, before showing how nature conservation on the Senkaku became tangled up in the sovereignty dispute over the islands in the 1960s. In the early 1960s the Ishigaki-born naturalist Takara Tetsuo led a series of expeditions under Government of the Ryukyus auspices, aimed at promoting economic development of the (then largely uninhabited Senkaku Islands. These forays came to nothing, but in the run-up to Okinawan Reversion in 1972, Takara helped stoke a nationwide panic about Taiwanese fishermen 'poaching' seabird eggs on the Senkakus. Later, in the early 2010s, a diplomatic dispute broke out between China and Japan when the Japan Coast Guard arrested a Chinese fishing captain who "trespassed" into the islands' territorial waters. Japanese nationalists led by Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō used nature conservation as a pretext to lobby the central government to take harder line on the dispute. Prominent Japanese conservation ecologists, including former students of Takara Tetsuo, joined in the campaign even whilst disavowing any nationalist motivations.

The involvement of purportedly apolitical scientists in diplomat disputes raises questions about the relationship between science, nationalism and state power. It also suggests continuities between colonial and postcolonial strategies of staking claim to territory.