The Japanese government is considering a plan to allow foreign-registered oil tankers and other energy transporter ships operated by Japanese firms to hoist the Japanese national flag as a way to protect them from pirates.
That will come as a relief to the owners of many ships operated by Japanese companies, which are registered in Panama and other countries that tax vessels at rates lower than Japan’s.
The flags they fly indicate the country of their registration, but it has long been noted that most “flags of convenience” do not inspire awe in pirates since the countries that provide them tend to be small islands with little power to respond.
But Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport is considering a separation of a ship’s registration and the flag it carries so that a foreign-registered oil tanker owned and run by a Japanese company could still hoist the Japanese flag and thus be under the protection of the Japanese government.
Flag waving
One official made the case for change plain enough: “It is imperative that ships under government responsibility and protection be increased so that imports of oil and other commodities will not be stopped.”
While official Japanese muscle may prove a deterrent to pirates on the high seas, it seems to have no bearing at all on China’s actions on the main-especially when it comes to the pursuit of oil and gas.
Last week, a Chinese ship-the 3,235-ton Dongfanghong No. 2-defied repeated radio warnings by a Japanese Coast Guard patrol ship and continued to collect undersea mud and water samples as part of a marine survey near some disputed islands in the East China Sea.
The Chinese vessel was spotted about 24 km southwest of islets between Japan’s southern island of Okinawa and Taiwan in the East China Sea while conducting unreported surveys, violating a bilateral accord that requires advance notice, according to a Japanese Coast Guard spokesman.
No violation
The ship did not violate Japan’s territorial waters but stayed within the Japanese 200-natutical mile exclusive economic zone-the waters where a country has rights to explore and use marine resources under international law, the spokesman said.
Japan’s Coast Guard said it asked the Foreign Ministry to lodge a protest and urge Beijing to stop the survey. In Beijing, however, a member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s press department had no immediate comment and said only that officials would look into the matter.
It’s not clear what the Chinese would do about the action, but it did not portend well for planned talks between the two countries this month aimed at resolving a different dispute over gas exploration rights elsewhere in the East China Sea.
When it comes to peace moves these days, attention often seems to be flagging.