State-owned Nagoya land sale to consulate of China shelved amid row

Monday, Dec. 20, 2010

NAGOYA (Kyodo) A local bureau of the Finance Ministry has put on hold the sale of state-owned land in central Nagoya to the Chinese Consulate General amid local protests over Beijing's claim to sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, sources said Sunday.

The Tokai Local Finance Bureau posted the notice of sale for the 31,000-sq.-meter plot next to Nagoya Castle for three months from April 15, to which the consulate applied for 10,000 sq. meters and Aichi Gakuin University is seeking 21,000 sq. meters, the bureau sources said.

The bureau was planning to finish reviewing the sale plan by September and sign a deal with the parties within this fiscal year, which ends next March, but matters became complicated after a Chinese trawler was involved in a run-in with Japan Coast Guard patrol vessels near the Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands in September.

As bilateral ties soured after China pressed its sovereignty over the uninhabited islets, opposition grew among local residents and the bureau began to receive dozens of protest e-mails and calls every day, they said.

"China clearly showed us a hardline stance in the (trawler-JCG) collision incident, and we cannot accept sales of Japanese-owned land when we are having a territorial problem," said Reiko Hayashi, 63, a company employee in Nagoya who has collected 10,000 signatures against the sale of the land and submitted them to the bureau.

The bureau has subsequently told the university to indefinitely suspend the sale, saying it "would like to see how things go." The plan has effectively been frozen, the sources said.

While noting that the bureau cannot reject the application by the consulate, because it sees no technical problem, its officials said they will have to deal with the matter carefully after receiving such "unexpectedly serious" protests from residents. They are now uncertain whether the land can actually be sold, they added.

The consulate has said it has no comment on the matter.

In a similar development, Niigata also suspended the sale of city-owned land to another Chinese Consulate due to local opposition following the maritime collisions off the uninhabited islands, called the Diaoyu Islands in China.