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20 Int'l J. Marine & Coastal L. 97 (2005)
Interpreting a Geographical Expression in a Nineteenth Century Cession Treaty and the Sekaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute

handle is hein.journals/ljmc20 and id is 109 raw text is: Interpreting a Geographical Expression in a Nineteenth Century Cession Treaty and the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute Erdem Denk* Research Assistant, University of Ankara, Turkey Introduction The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands' dispute has been on the (hidden) agenda of Sino2-Japanese relations for a long time.3 Both parties contend that these islands belong to them and they base their arguments on various historical, PhD Candidate, Cardiff Law School, UK; erdemdenk@hotmail.com. The writer would like to thank to Prof Robin Churchill of Cardiff Law School, Dr Alex Oude Elferink of the Netherlands Institute for the Law of the Sea and the anonymous referee of this journal for their very useful comments. Also special thanks to The Tokyo Foundation which sponsored a research trip to Japan in March 2001. He himself bears the responsibility for the remaining errors. This island group, which includes eight islands mainly clustered around the largest island, Uotsuri, is known as Senkaku Retto in Japan, Diaoyu Tai in China, and Tiao Yu T'ai in Taiwan. 2 As is well known, there is a representation issue between Taiwan and the mainland China. Since almost all of the arguments of China and Taiwan regarding the disputes examined in the present study are the same, their arguments will be given together. See also Y. Matsui, International Law of Territorial Acquisition and the Dispute Over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands 40 Japanese Annual of International Law 3 (1997), at 3-4; and D. Dzurek, The Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute, <ibru.dur.ac.uk/docs/Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.html>. (The legal status of) these islands came on to the international agenda in the early 1970s following an ECAFE (United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East) report published in 1968 which predicted that there were huge oil reserves in the East China Sea (see also U. Suganuma, Sovereignty Rights and Territorial Space in Sino-Japanese Re- lations: Irredentism and Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands (Honolulu, 2000), at 129; and Dzurek, supra note 2). It is only after then that the sovereignty of these islands has become a dispute which now and then triggered even hot conflicts between China and Japan. It is therefore that the USA, which administered (1951-1971) the Okinawa Islands, which according to both the 1951 San Francisco Treaty (Article 3) and the 1971 Okinawa Reversion Treaty (Article 1(1)), explicitly included the Senkaku Islands as well, made it clear that this treaty does not affect the legal status of those islands at all. Whatever the legal situation was prior to the treaty is going to be the legal situation after the treaty comes into effect. (Hearings before the US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 92nd Congress, 1st Session (Washington, 1971), at II). See texts of the 1951 San Francisco Treaty in United States Treaties and other International Agreements, Vol. 3, Part 3, Washington, Department of State, 1952, THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARINE AND COASTAL LAW, Vol 20, No 1 © Koninklijke Brill NV, 2005

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