Japan Has 14,125 Islands. Chinese Buyers Own Parts of Them Near U.S. Bases.

For the first time in its modern history, the Japanese government is going to find out who actually owns the country.

According to Nikkei Shimbun, Tokyo will launch a sweeping review of land registration records across all 14,125 of Japan’s islands, with investigative priority placed on the Ogasawara archipelago, Okinawa, and the Seto Inland Sea — three theaters that share a single awkward characteristic. Each sits adjacent to a U.S. military installation, a Japan Self-Defense Force base, or both. The decision follows years of accumulating, and increasingly difficult to ignore, reports of Chinese nationals quietly acquiring parcels on remote islands within line of sight of facilities central to the U.S.–Japan alliance.

It is the kind of administrative task a country normally completes once and forgets. Japan is doing it now because the answers are no longer obvious — and because, in several documented cases, the answers point directly at Beijing.

Japan didn’t know how many islands it had

The starting point is itself extraordinary. For thirty-five years, the official count stood at 6,852, drawn from a 1987 Japan Coast Guard survey conducted on paper maps. On February 28, 2023, the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) released a digital re-count using aerial photography and modern mapping techniques, applying the identical “100-meter coastline” criterion. The new figure: 14,125. Japan’s territory had not grown. Its self-awareness had.

Only the four traditional main islands — Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku — together with Okinawa’s main island, form the country’s inhabited core. The remaining 14,120 are classified as remote or outlying. Tokyo directly administers roughly 690, primarily inhabited islands and baseline points used to define Japan’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone. The other 13,400-plus have, for decades, drifted in administrative obscurity: privately owned, unregistered, or held by heirs who never bothered to complete inheritance filings.

That obscurity is the asset Beijing has been quietly exploiting.

Yanaha Island, 60 kilometers from Kadena

The case that first broke this issue into public consciousness was Yanaha Island, a 740,000-square-meter uninhabited landmass in the village of Izena, north of Okinawa’s main island. Public records show that a Tokyo-based consulting firm specializing in Chinese business — itself a Chinese-affiliated entity — has owned roughly half of Yanaha since February 2021.