A lighthouse built by Japanese ultranationalists has reignited Asia's dispute over the Senkaku islands, with Japan's coast guard having to repel Chinese and Taiwanese coming to claim the East China Sea territory.
Fanning regional anger is the Japanese government's hands-off policy toward the right-wing activists who erected the beacon on one of the craggy islets, controlled by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan.Beijing has accused Japan of tolerating the rightists and of using the dispute as an excuse to build up its military. Street protests over the issue have erupted in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
On Monday, at least 17 Japanese coast guard and police vessels drove away three boats carrying Taiwanese and Hong Kong legislators who wanted to plant a Taiwanese flag on the islands, 110 miles northeast of Taiwan.
No one was injured, but the group from Taiwan vowed to return next month to try again. Other boatloads of protesters left Hong Kong on Sunday and were expected to confront the Japanese coast guard surrounding the islands late Wednesday.
There is more at stake here than fishing rights and the prospects of oil in the seabed beneath the Senkaku islands, which the United States returned to Japan in 1972.
Much of Asia still holds bitter memories of Japan's militarist aggression during World War II, and any hint of Japanese nationalism provokes outrage from the Chinese.
Four of the eight islands - known as Diaoyu in China and Tiaoyutai in Taiwan - are owned by Japan's government and four by private Japanese citizens.
The government said it cannot take action against the right-wing Japan Youth Association - even though it built the lighthouse on a private island without seeking the owners' permission - because no laws have been broken.
The owners, businessmen Hiroyuki and Kunioki Kurihara, said they don't plan to file a complaint.
Meanwhile, the right-wing group remains defiant.
Leader Toyohisa Etoh said he can count on his group of emperor-worshiping ultranationalists and tough yakuza gangsters to fight to their deaths to defend Japan's claim of sovereignty.
The Japan Youth Association is one of the most active and well-funded of the 1,000 right-wing groups in the country, totaling some 90,000 members.
The right wing has long sought to revive nostalgia toward Japan's former militarist glory under an emperor adored as divine.
Such groups and gangs still have potent links with mainstream political and business groups. The Japanese government and police generally don't crack down on the right wing unless it flagrantly violates the law.
Yukio Hori, an expert on rightists at Tohoku Fukushi University, says the dispute is just what the rightists want.
"No one had been paying any attention to them, so this is the moment they've been waiting for," Hori said in an interview. "They feel they are finally being recognized."