Tokyo — Japan scrambled fighter jets on Thursday
after one Chinese state-owned airplane entered airspace over islands at
the center of a dispute between Tokyo and Beijing.
F-15 jets were mobilized after a Chinese maritime aircraft ventured
over the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyus, just after 11
am (0200 GMT), Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told reporters.
Chinese government ships have moved in and out of waters around the
islands for more than two months, but this was the first time since the
dispute flared that Tokyo has claimed any airborne incursion into what
it says is Japanese territory.
Four maritime
surveillance vessels were logged in waters around the islands earlier in
the day, the coastguard said, adding it had ordered them to leave.
Such confrontations have become commonplace since Japan nationalized
the East China Sea islands in September, a move it insisted amounted to
nothing more than a change of ownership of what was already Japanese
territory.
But Beijing reacted with fury, with
observers saying the riots that erupted across China had at least tacit
backing from the Communist Party government.
Thursday marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of an episode known
as the Nanjing Massacre, when Japanese Imperial Army troops entered the
then-capital of China and embarked on an orgy of violence. — Agence France-Presse
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