Sino-Japanese tensions ease

SHANGHAI – Tension between China and Japan eased slightly Monday after Tokyo released 14 crew members of the Chinese fishing trawler seized last Tuesday in the East China Sea.

The captain of the trawler, Zhan Qixiong, remains in custody under a warrant that allows Japanese prosecutors to hold him without charges until Sept. 19.

On Monday, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku told reporters: "We will handle this as a criminal case based on Japanese domestic law."

The trawler, the Minjinyu 5179, either collided with or was rammed by a Japanese Coast Guard vessel in the East China Sea near the disputed Diaoyu Islands, which lie about the same distance from China, Taiwan and Japan and are claimed by all three.

Beijing called in the Japanese Ambassador Uichiro Niwa four times over the incident, most recently "in the early hours of Sunday," when State Counsellor Dai Bingguo became the highest ranking official to urge him to tell his masters to make "a wise political resolution."

A Japanese government spokesman said: "It was regrettable that Ambassador Niwa was summoned at such late hours."

The crew returned to China on a chartered aircraft and Japanese officials said their trawler would be released and sent home using a substitute crew.

As it escalated its response to the seizing of the trawler, China last week postponed a series of meetings with Japan, including talks about the East China Sea that were scheduled for mid-September.

The Diaoyu Islands, called Senkaku by the Japanese and Tiaoyutai by the Taiwanese, are a string of uninhabited islands that Japan says it was awarded by treaty in 1895 following the Sino-Japanese War and now claims are part of its Okinawa prefecture. The Chinese claim the treaty, which also gave Taiwan to the Japanese, was both unjust and never widely recognized and that the islands have been included on maps of China since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Even today, China’s historical animosity toward Japan is never far from the surface and after nearly a week of Internet outrage over the trawler incident, the official media is beating the drum, too.

On Monday, the China Daily published a front-page story about the incarcerated trawler captain, suggesting his capture contributed to the death of his grandmother.

"(Zhan Qixiong’s) 85-year-old grandmother – who was recovering from an earlier fall – died last Wednesday after hearing of his arrest," the paper wrote.

"’She was fine when I called her in the morning,’ relative Zhen Feng told China Daily. ‘But she got a lot worse after she heard the news.’"

The grandmother’s body has now been packed in ice until Zhan returns, since he is the eldest grandson and must lead the traditional death rituals at her funeral.

Territorial disputes in the seas around China have heated up in recent months with China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines all arguing ownership of tiny islands that lie in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and which many suspect sit on top of rich oil and gas deposits. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even weighed in on the issue this summer, telling delegates at a meeting in Hanoi that it is in Washington’s "national interest" that the disputes are settled fairly.