Japan finds itself the target of a storm of nationalist Chinese fury from Beijing to Taipei. While the dispute centers on a group of tiny islands claimed by China in the East China Sea, the stakes could encompass a billion dollar Japanese drug trade and U.S. containment policy. PNS associate editor Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo.

TOKYO -- A typhoon of nationalist sentiment is sweeping across the East China Sea, uniting the Chinese of Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland against an old foe -- Japan. The dispute could ultimately affect both U.S. containment policy towards China and the role of Japan's organized crime network, the Yakuza, in Golden Triangle drug trafficking.

The dispute centers on a small group of uninhabited islets known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and the Senkaku in Japanese. When a Japanese rightist group raised a lighthouse on one of the islands -- and Japan's coast guard (the Maritime Safety Agency) backed their action -- outraged Chinese activists responded with mass rallies, flag-burnings, consumer boycotts, and angry editorials from Taipei to Beijing.

The average Japanese office worker would have trouble locating the islands on a map, let alone rallying to their defense. Indeed, Japan's claim to the islets is so flimsy Tokyo has not yet bothered to rebut China's charge that the islets have been illegally held as colonies by Japan since the Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s.

So why is Tokyo so adamant about controlling these specks of rock?

The Japanese media has suggested that, because the islets lie on the Asian continental shelf, there may be oil reserves below the sea bed. But the islands are situated right on the path of the world's most powerful storms -- like the Kamikazes -- making the prospect of constructing oil-drilling platforms there economically unfeasible.

A more likely rationale for Japanese control is the islands' strategic importance especially should the U.S. opt for a stronger containment policy towards China. Extending Japanese territorial waters more than 300 miles eastward from the Okinawa chain would allow the U.S. Seventh Fleet and the Japanese Self Defense Force to conduct joint naval exercises next door to the sensitive Taiwan Strait and right off China's soft belly, south of Shanghai. Some defense experts speculate this is why the Pentagon has quietly consented to the antics of the Japanese right-wingers.

By coincidence or design, just as the lighthouse was erected the Self-Defense Force released a paper referring for the first time to China as the main military threat to Japan. The paper also coincided with the revival of Maritime Day as a national holiday to celebrate the anniversary of Japan's birth as a modern sea power. (The holiday was dropped after World War II.)

Maritime Day's revival points to the third and most ominous reason behind Tokyo's interests in the islands: protecting a key channel for Japanese drug traffickers to ship Golden Triangle heroin from Asia across the Pacific.

For decades the main lobbyist for restoring Maritime Day was the godfather of the Japanese underworld, the late Ryoichi Sasakawa. In the 1930s Sasakawa served as a military policeman in Japanese occupied Shanghai where he organized the official Japanese monopoly over the opium trade in East Asia.

The wartime drug trade later evolved, with the help of triads, the yakuza and corrupt officials, into the massive flow of "China white" heroin within the region and into the United States.

The imminent return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule threatens to block this vital channel for Golden Triangle heroin as well as methamphetamines (which are synthesized in Taiwan, South Korea and western Japan). The only way to keep it open is to keep the Chinese Navy out of the oceanic Senkaku Triangle between Taiwan, Kyushu and Korea's Cheju Island.

In short, the area will be safe to drug traffickers only so long as it is guarded by the Seventh Fleet (which has no authority to interdict civilian craft) and the Maritime Safety Agency. That agency is under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Ministry, which has been linked to a massive political corruption scandal involving major organized crime groups.

Meanwhile, officers with the Japanese police's drug enforcement bureau often complain of being kept on a too-short leash.

With billions of dollars at stake in the East Asian drug trade, it should come as no surprise that the Japan Youth Federation, the right wing group that erected the controversial lighthouse, is based in the Ginza hostess-bar district and closely allied with the Sumiyoshi-rengo, Japan's second-largest crime organization.