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Japan deployed a naval patrol aircraft to monitor two Chinese warships as they approached Japanese territory on their way to the Pacific Ocean, the Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday.
Photographs taken by a P-1 maritime patrol aircraft from Kanoya, on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu, revealed the gray hulls of the Chinese navy's Type 054A or Jiangkai II-class frigate, the Changzhou, and its Type 056 or Jiangdao-class corvette, the Luan. The images were released in a report by the Joint Staff of Japan's Self-Defense Forces on May 7, indicating that the ships were detected two days earlier while moving from the East China Sea into the Philippine Sea.
Japan's military is well-equipped, and U.S. officials have praised the security treaty ally's decision to rearm and enhance joint training for regional contingencies. This comes at a time when leaders in both countries express concerns about China's geopolitical ambitions and its rapidly expanding hard power, which could challenge America's leadership of the existing international order. Despite limitations imposed by its post-war constitution, Tokyo is leveraging its alliance with Washington to protect its expansive maritime borders against territorial claims from neighboring China, as well as the unpredictable alliance of authoritarian leaders in Russia and North Korea across its northern seas.
Japan's Joint Staff, which regularly reports on Russian and Chinese ship movements near its territory, stated that its forces first spotted the naval vessels Changzhou and Luan 25 miles south of the Kusagaki Islands. The pair sailed eastward through the Osumi Strait into the Pacific Ocean.
A map by Newsweek, created using the Japanese government's geospatial data, illustrates the paths taken by China's ships in relation to Japan's claimed territorial waters, typically extending 12 nautical miles from the coast. The Osumi Strait was one of several strategic waterways utilized by Russia and China's navies in the past year as they navigated the so-called first island chain, a U.S. defense concept that envisions multiple maritime chokepoints during wartime. The two navies frequently used the Osumi Strait and also traveled through the Tsugaru Strait in the north, the Tsushima Strait in the south, and the Miyako Strait in the southwest near Okinawa, which hosts roughly two-thirds of the American troops stationed in Japan. In the last fiscal year, Japan scrambled Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets against mostly Russian and Chinese aircraft 669 times, according to its Joint Staff.
A map by Newsweek displaying the sorties showed the Japanese islands surrounded on three sides. The Chinese and Russian defense ministries did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding their frequent operations around Japan.