How a Japanese island has quietly disappeared | Smart News

"It's the season of the endangered islands. At the end of last month, an isolated Hawaiian island, once a major nesting site for green sea turtles, was destroyed by Hurricane Walaka in the Pacific. Now, as Justin McCurry relates to the guardian, an uninhabited islet off Japan's northeastern coast has disappeared; its absence has been ignored for a time by the inhabitants of a nearby village on the main island of Hokkaido.

Hiroshi Shimizu, an author who wrote on the islands of Japan, was the first to comment on the disappearance of Esanbe Hanakita Kojima. During a visit to Sarufutsu, a village located at the northern tip of Hokkaido, he realized that the island was nowhere else and contacted the association of local fishing cooperatives, according to the newspaper . Asahi Shimbun. The association looked at his chart and confirmed that where Esanbe Hanakita Kojima once stood, there is more than an empty sea.

The last time the island was surveyed in 1987, it was less than five feet above the water. The Japanese coastguard has speculated that the small island is likely to be eroded by wind and sea ice forming in the Okhotsk Sea, which lies between Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.

"It is not impossible that the mining elements will deteriorate," said an anonymous coastguard France Media Agency.

But the authorities had little information to provide. They could not even tell what the size of the island was before it disappeared, according to the newspaper AFP. Japan has named Esanbe, along with 158 other uninhabited islands, in 2014, as part of an effort to cement the parameters of its territory.

Under international law, nations can only claim areas around visible islands at high tide, and the disappearance of "Esbebe" could have a minimal impact on Japan's territorial waters, "said the responsible for Coast Guard in government. AFP. However, although any potential loss is small, the coastguard plans to conduct a "detailed study" of the waters that have engulfed the missing island, reports the Japanese outlet NHK.

The area where Esanbe once arose under water is controversial and is located to the west of the four Kuril Islands (known in Japan as the Northern Territories), which is a sensitive point in the relations between Japan and Russia for decades. Russia took control of the Kuriles in Japan at the end of the Second World War, but both nations claimed the resource-rich islands, coveted for their fishing grounds and rhenium deposits. Longstanding conflicts over the islands have prevented Japan and Russia from signing a formal peace treaty to end the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in September that he wants to sign an agreement this year, but it seems unlikely that negotiations will progress as long as the standoff over the islands remains unresolved.

"[O]Our position that the issue of Northern Territories must be resolved before any peace treaty remains unchanged, "said Yoshihide Suga, Secretary-General of Japan's Cabinet, told AFP. Al Jazeera.

The loss of Esanbe may slightly reduce Japan's claims in an area where it wants to ensure its presence. But on the positive side for the country, we know that the continental masses not only disappear, but also materialize in the region, such as the AFP points out. In 2013, for example, one side of the road caused the sea to emerge from an almost 300-meter submerged coastal strip of the Hokkaido coast, making Japan a little bigger.

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