Coast Guard commanders have more discretion to use their weapons than the Japanese Navy. In fact, it was involved in the only running sea battle in Japan since the end of World War II, The incident in December 2001, near the coast of Kyushu, pitted several cutters against a suspicious vessel thought to be a North Korean “spy” ship.
The Japanese Coast Guard fired warning shots to stop the ship and then fired directly into the bow. The North Koreans returned fire with automatic rifles, wounding a couple guardsmen, but did not use the ZPU anti-aircraft cannon with which it was equipped. Eventually the Koreans scuttled the ship and all 10 crewmembers went down with it.
Tokyo was interested enough in what this vessel was up to that it took the trouble and considerable expense of raising the vessel from 90 meters of water. It is now on display at the Japan Coast Guard Museum in Yokohama. Indeed, it is virtually the only exhibit. Cannon holes are clearly visible in the bow.
Besides strengthening its conventional naval power, China has also been beefing up its comparable fleet of ocean research vessels and armed fishery monitoring vessels, some of which have been deployed in the South China Sea to police its claims in that sea, as well as to assert its claims in the East China Sea.
These vessels are armed with machine guns, though they probably could not hold their own against some of Japan’s larger patrol vessels equipped with 20mm or 40mm cannon should the two sides escalate their confrontation from water cannons to something that actually involves exchanging gunfire.
However, despite their armament, Coast Guard vessels are not true warships. They lack the weapons, armament and sensors necessary to survive modern naval battles. They have no torpedoes, anti-ship cruise missiles, sonar or anti-submarine defenses. No cutter would last 10 minutes in a battle with a modern Chinese destroyer.
Fortunately, things have not advanced that far. The main worry in the Senkaku dispute is that the Chinese or Taiwanese, or both acting together, would “swarm” the islands territorial waters overpowering the Coast Guard by sheer numbers. That is what the Taiwanese attempted on Sept. 24, by sending 40 fishing vessels and 12 Taiwan coast guard vessels into the territorial waters.
Still, it works both ways, as Chinese and Taiwanese fishermen might prefer to actually do some fishing rather than serve as (water) cannon fodder. Both sides seemed to welcome the approach of a typhoon in early October that sent the vessels temporarily scurrying to the shelter of their respective homeports.
So far the expansion of the Japanese Coast Guard has not upset Japan’s neighbors in northeast Asia and that may be a good thing, as the Coast Guard can perform more missions that if executed by the regular Navy would be considered dangerously provocative.
