During the Senkaku incident of September 2010, newspapers mistakenly claimed that a Chinese fishing vessel "collided" with two Japanese coast guard vessels.
Now the video has leaked, so we can all decide: Collision…or deliberate ram?
You make the call: (It's an 11 minute video, with the impact taking place at 2:18. There's little of interest beyond the 5 minute mark, but knock yourself out if you like.)
Another video shows the Chinese ship ramming (sorry, "colliding with") the second ship. This one has English subtitles:
No wonder the current Japanese government wanted to keep these under wraps — for they clearly show that Prime Minister Naoto Kan released guilty men under pressure from the Butchers of Beijing.
Best thing Japan can do now is release ALL the tapes in the interests of transparency. We've got all the money shots now, but for completeness sake the rest need to be made public.
And the worst thing? Attempt to cover it all up by maintaining the current fiction that the tapes are part of "an ongoing judicial investigation" and cannot be released. Because in case Prime Minister Kan hasn't noticed, the case ceased to be a judicial one the day the Chinese took Japanese hostages in order to get Captain Ramboat back.
UPDATE: Good story, bad headline — Senkaku collisions video leak riles China. (Bad headline because the story itself makes it clear that China doesn't seem too "riled". And of course, the two ramming incidents were more than mere "collisions").
Nonetheless, it seems the Japanese government is blustering about prosecuting those whose only crime was revealing the totality of Kan's surrender on this issue. Idiots.
UPDATE #2: Great stuff from the Afterword of this post by Ampontan:
"Had the Kan government been born with a spine, they would have done [what Adlai Stevenson did at the U.N. during the Cuban missile crisis]. They could have shown the world what the Chinese did, just as the world saw what the Soviets were doing in 1962."
UPDATE (Nov 9/2010): Japanese government seizes YouTube records to find identity of leaker. Dunno how well that's gonna go over — freeing Captain Ramboat but punishing the guy who revealed C.R.'s guilt.
UPDATE #4: Prosecutor's office bombarded with over a thousand requests from the Japanese public to drop the inquiry against the leaker.
Meanwhile, opposition parties in Japan grouse that the government has shown them less footage (6 minutes in total) than were leaked to the public.
Ha I saw that at Ampontan too. But mebbe the J government is being subtler. First get everyone on the BJ side to commit to their lies, then expose what a bunch of liars the PRC is with this “leak”.
It’d be nice to think so, Michael.
But my impression is that Japan has enjoyed the fruits of peace for so long now that its completely out of its element when confronted with the type of low-intensity conflict that China has initiated.