Hawaiʻi is not the only location of a noteworthy international military exercise in recent days.
Japan’s Defense Minister says Chinese and Russian naval ships held live-fire military drills within Japan’s exclusive economic zone this past weekend.
The Japanese Defense Ministry says it happened a little more than a hundred miles off the coast of Okinotori — an uninhabited coral atoll where Japan maintains a maritime observation site.
Japan calls it an island, the southernmost point in the country, but that claim is disputed by China, as well as by Taiwan and South Korea, all of which call Okinotori a rock, because most of it is underwater.
The distinction is an important one. According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an Exclusive Economic Zone stretches about 230 miles from the coast of an island, but only 12 miles from a rock.
The United States does not have an official position on whether Okinotori is a rock, a reef or an island. But what’s beyond dispute is the increasing friction between Japan and China.
Russia and China just wrapped up a week of joint activities called “Exercise Joint Sea 2026,” based out of eastern China.
According to the Chinese Communist Party’s “Global Times,” the exercise included the first time Chinese and Russian submarines appeared together