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Japanese book reveals disputed islands’ true history

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Cai Hong

China Daily

Publication Date : 02-07-2013

Tadayoshi Murata, professor of Japans Yokohama National University and his book The Origins of the Japan-China Territorial Issue.

Tadayoshi Murata, a professor at Japan's Yokohama National University, has dug into Japanese archives to find evidence that indicates Japan does not have historical ownership of the Diaoyu Islands.

In his newly published book, "The Origins of the Japan-China Territorial Issue", Murata insisted the islets belong to China. Given the current situation, he called for joint management and mutual understanding on the issue.

Murata's book starts with a study of the history of the Ryukyu and Okinawa Islands. Japan seized Ryukyu in 1879 and changed its name to Okinawa Prefecture.

"The Diaoyu Islands never emerged in the history of Ryukyu," the professor told journalists and scholars in Tokyo on Monday.

"Historically, Ryukyu's territory was clear and included more than 80 islets, with the Diaoyu Islands not included."

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Japanese book reveals disputed islands' true history

Jurassic Park Camp Jurassic Tour and Walkthrough Islands of Adventure Universal Orlando Resort – Video

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Jurassic Park Camp Jurassic Tour and Walkthrough Islands of Adventure Universal Orlando Resort
Take a tour around the Camp Jurassic section of Jurassic Park at Islands of Adventure. Located at the Universal Orlando Resort in Orlando, Florida. Camp Jura...

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Jurassic Park Camp Jurassic Tour and Walkthrough Islands of Adventure Universal Orlando Resort - Video

Report: AMD’s Volcanic Islands GPUs Launching in October Without HD 8000 Branding

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ChinaDIY has reported that AMDs next-generation Volcanic Islands GPUs will be launched in October 2013.

ChinaDIY has reported that AMDs next-generation Volcanic Islands GPUs will be launched in October at the beginning of Q4 2013 and will not be released with the Radeon HD 8000 series branding.

This report is, of course, unconfirmed and highly speculative since we dont have any information on these upcoming GPUs except for the codenames found in a leaked Catalyst driver last month.

This being said, the October release date is certainly plausible since Nvidia has launched its new 700 series GPUs, and Ross Taylor (AMDs VP of Global Channel Sales) previously hinted that Battlefield 4 (which releases on October 29) may be included in a future Never Settle: Reloaded bundle and would be an ideal flagship title for the companys new graphics cards.

Avoid gaming bottlenecks and keep your system balanced with the latest information abou...

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Report: AMD's Volcanic Islands GPUs Launching in October Without HD 8000 Branding

Gulls, cormorants being surveyed on Maine islands

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AP/July 3, 2013

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) Wildlife officials are surveying gull and cormorant populations on Maines coastal islands.

The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is monitoring population and breeding distribution changes of great black-backed gulls, herring gulls and double-crested cormorants. Theyre also surveying common eiders on selected islands.

The survey is using a combination of aerial photographs, aerial counting and ground surveys in which crews walk the islands and count the number of nests that contain eggs.

Officials say between 1996 and 2008, the number of nesting black-backed gulls declined 42 percent, nesting herring gulls fell 30 percent and nesting cormorants dropped 45 percent. Biologists believe the decline is due to fewer fish to feed on and increased predation from a growing eagle population.

Copyright 2013 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Gulls, cormorants being surveyed on Maine islands

Pacific Islands Struggle With Poor Internet Speeds

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PJ Heller / ZUMA PRESS / Corbis

The Talamahu Market in the capital city of Nukualofa on the island of Tongatapu, Dec. 2, 2010.

The opening line on the Kingdom of Tongas tourism website reads, Welcome to life in the slow lane. It could be the national motto. The Polynesian nation of 176 far-flung islands but just 105,000 people has a long tradition of sitting on the sidelines of world affairs. Alone among island nations of the Pacific, Tonga was never colonized by a foreign power, mostly because foreign powers saw no compelling reason to extend their empires some 3,000 km east of Australia. An unbroken succession of local chiefs and kings has ruled over the islands for more than a thousand years. But there are downsides to Tongas state of restful isolation.

The Internet is very sporadic here, and the speed is quite slow, says Minoru Nishi Jr., a local importer-exporter. Connection speeds on the island lag far behind world standards, a reality that sets in every time Nishi returns from a visit to China or Japan. You get on the plane, he says, and go, oh no. A single high-resolution picture can take six to seven hours to send as an attachment, assuming it sends at all. Often what happens is it just cuts off, Nishi says, forcing him to restart the process all over again. We have to wait until the middle of the night, when there are no people on the Internet.

Hes not alone in his frustration. A local telecom executive said he has a habit of making coffee after he hits a button to download a document. The Secretary for Information and Communications says friends stop him in the street to complain about dropped calls over Skype. In fact, across all the island nations of the Pacific, a combined population of around 10 million people is chafing against narrow bandwidths that most of the world left behind in the screechy-modem days of the early 90s.

(MORE: Why Six Strikes Could Be a Nightmare for Anyone With Shared Internet)

The problem boils down to the Pacific Islands unique geography. Theres no other place in the world as remote and as small and as fragmented, says Franz Drees-Gross, the World Banks country director for the region. Take Kiribati, a nation of 100,000 people. Theyre on islands spread over a surface area equivalent to India, but if you were to collapse the islands into a single landmass, it would be thesize of New Delhi.

Telecom companies blanch at the cost of connecting these scattered islands to the rest of the world. Inthe age of the mobile device, its easy to forget the fact that the Internet at least the high-speed variety that many of us take for granted is a physical thing. It is zapped through undersea cables that span the worlds oceans, connecting continent to continent and landmass to landmass.

The first fiber-optic cables were laid down alongside telegraph cables from the mid-1800s. These bundles of glass wires as thin as a strand of hair are coated in a layer of resin or bands of steel to protect them from abrasions on the seafloor. The cables must wend their way around volcanic chasms and pick through delicate growths of coral reef before surfacing at a landing station, where Internet-service providers distribute bandwidth to customers.

Telecoms companies have gradually extended these cables to every populated area of the globe, with one notable exception: the fragmented populations of the Pacific Islands. There, the cost of building a cable dwarfs the revenue that could be collected from such a tiny base of subscribers. The investment may take decades to pay off, if ever. So the telecoms industry has understandably bypassed the region, leaving islanders to grapple with costly satellite connections that can rack up bills as high as $500 a month.

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Pacific Islands Struggle With Poor Internet Speeds

Flight of the Hippogriff Front Row POV The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Islands of Adventure – Video

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Flight of the Hippogriff Front Row POV The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Islands of Adventure
Take a front row POV (point of view) on the Flight of the Hippogriff at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Islands of Adventure. Located at the Universal...

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Flight of the Hippogriff Front Row POV The Wizarding World of Harry Potter Islands of Adventure - Video


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