A Risky Game Of Chicken; Japan and China's growing assertiveness in the East China Sea could start a military skirmish--or worse.

Byline: Christian Caryl (With Akiko Kashiwagi)

It's a glorious late-summer day over the East China Sea, cobalt blue ocean beneath a warm and hazy sky. But this mission is all business for the crew of a P3-C Orion flown by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces (as Tokyo refers to its Navy). Dropping down to a mere 200 meters above the waves, the plane slowly banks to peek at a yellow-and-white drilling platform anchored in the sea below. Suddenly the radio loudspeaker in the plane's cockpit crackles, and a rapid burst of Mandarin Chinese attests that the men on the rig have taken notice of the visitor. "Sometimes you can even see the Chinese flag down there," says one of the pilots.

Not that either side needs a reminder of who's who. The Chunxiao gas fields in the center of the East China Sea--where Beijing is hunting for energy in waters hard against the boundary line of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claimed by Japan--are a long way from the back rooms of Tokyo. But there's no question that events in this lonely corner of the ocean will be much on the mind of Shinzo Abe, Japan's prospective prime minister, as he settles into his new job over the next few weeks. Earlier this month, tensions in the area rose another notch, when the Japanese government protested the completion of yet another Chinese drilling rig in the area. Tokyo fears that the Chinese might siphon off energy resources from its side of the line.

This isn't just a scuffle over scarce natural resources, but one part of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of problems. The dispute over EEZ boundaries, for example, is intimately linked to China's insistence that the nearby, uninhabited Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai in Chinese) really belong to the mainland. Tokyo begs to differ. And behind the complex tussles over maritime law looms the much more fundamental issue of how to manage potential conflict between the rising naval aspirations of Beijing and the tightly linked forces of Japan and its ally the United States.

"Just look at the map," says Toshi Yoshihara, an expert on naval strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. To the north, he points out, the East China Sea gives way to the Tsushima Strait, one of the strategic linchpins of Northeast Asia, where Russia and Japan fought an epochal battle in 1905. To the south lies Taiwan, which Beijing has pledged to reunite with the People's Republic, and which both Japan and the United States have recently begun to define as a common strategic interest they are obliged to defend. China's rapid naval buildup-- featuring a shopping spree in Russia for state-of-the-art weaponry, including superquiet Kilo subs--is aimed at helping it grab military control over Taiwan in the event of war. Part of its plan, say experts, involves ...