A Communist Chinese warship last week directed "fire-control" radar and lit up a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer in the East China Sea, where Japan and China are involved in a dispute over the ownership of a group of uninhabited islands, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Tuesday.
As the radar activated was for targeting and the move could have set off an inadvertent but inevitable military clash, Japan lodged a protest with China in Tokyo and Beijing on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after Japan condemned China over the intrusion of two Chinese vessels into its territorial waters around the islands the previous day.
The radar beaming, which a Japanese government source said had occurred in waters off the Japanese-administered, Chinese-claimed Senkaku Islands, called Diaoyu in China, is all but certain to further heighten tensions between the two countries.
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