Japan to deploy more ships, jets near Diaoyu Islands

Japan is reportedly planning to deploy two more patrol ships and stationing its F-15 fighter jets to an air base closer to the waters off the disputed Diaoyu Islands, as its elite ground troops launched their first exercise simulating the recapture of islands.

The 335-ton Kurose and the 3,100-ton helicopter-equppied Chikuzen will be deployed in August and October to the regional coast guard headquarters responsible for the Diaoyu Islands, the center of a bitter territorial row between China and Japan, according to NHK.

At the same time, the Kyodo News Agency said Japan's defense ministry was considering relocating the deployment of F-15 fighter jets from the Naba base to an airport on Shimojijima island, Okinawa Prefecture, with an aim to "react more promptly" to China's increasingly frequent patrols of the disputed islands.

China's defense ministry said last week that China had scrambled J-10 fighter jets to head off Japanese F-15 fighter jets that tailed a Chinese maritime surveillance plane near the airspace over the Diaoyu Islands.

On Sunday, around 300 troops from the First Airborne Brigade of Japan's Self-Defense forces, together with 20 warplanes and more than 30 military vehicles, took part in a 40-minute drill in Chiba, near Tokyo.

This was Japan's first military exercise designed to recapture "a remote island invaded by an enemy force," officials said, according to AFP.

Nonetheless, the exercise was dismissed by a Chinese military analyst as "self-deception."

"The most impossible scenario is to send ground forces to capture or recapture the small and uninhabited Diaoyu Islands in the case of real war in the sea," said Major General Peng Guangqian, deputy secretary-general of the National Security Policy Committee under the China Policy Science Research Association.

Feng Zhaokui, vice chairman of the China Association of Sino-Japanese Relations, believes the recent escalation of confrontation is a move by both sides to test each other's bottom line.

"Both Beijing and Tokyo want to increase the stakes in future negotiations to defuse current tension," Feng said.

Japan's newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Sunday that he would like to discuss the review of collective self-defense rights in his meeting with the US president in February.