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An uninhabited island off Japan's northern coast has disappeared, with no one on the verge of success.
If the island is confirmed to have slipped beneath the waves, Japan could see its territorial waters shrink, which would have implications for its regional dispute with Russia over control of an island chain nearby, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported.
The islet, called Esanbe Hanakita Kojima, sits around 1,650 feet off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in the Sea of Okhotsk. Just to the east, Russia calls on the Kuril Islands but which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories.
The islands were occupied by Soviet forces at the end of World War Two, and remain in Moscow's possession of Japanese protests to have their property restored to Tokyo. Alongside their strategic importance, some of the islands are home to valuable natural resources. The Russian-controlled island of Iturup-or Etorofu as Japan calls it-has deposits of gold, silver, natural gas, oil and rhenium, for example.
Esanbe is one of 158 islands that were named by the Japanese government in 2014 in an effort to bolster its territorial reach and underscore the extent of its exclusive economic zone. International law dictates that they can only be named if they can be seen above the water line, including at high tide.
If the island is gone the world's waters will shrink, though only by around 1,600 feet. This would open up a new gap between the Japanese and Russian boundaries.
The small island is more of a hideaway, but no one in the coastal village of Sarufutsu on Hokkaido's main island actually noticed. The disappearance only came to light after a visiting author-Hiroshi Shimizu-arrived in Sarufutsu to work on a book about Japan's "hidden" islands.
Shimizu informed the local fisheries cooperative that one of the islets he expected to see had gone. The cooperative's boats then set out to check the report and found nothing. According to the Japanese coast guard, the island was last surveyed at 4.5 feet above the water in 1987.
Veteran fishermen told Asahi Shimbun that while they remember an island being there ago, they avoided the area because navigation software recorded the landmass as an undersea reef.
The coast guard is a safe place to go to. The Guardian and Asahi Shimbun Esanbe may have been slowly eroded by the wind and drifted away from each other.
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