September
23, 2008: On September 13th, the
Japanese destroyer Atago spotted a submarine periscope about a kilometers away.
Even the ship's captain got a look at it before it submerged. The Atago turned
on its sonar, and radioed headquarters to see if there were any American or
Japanese subs in the area (off Kochi prefecture, on the southeast Pacific
coast). There weren't. The sub was in Japanese waters, and according to
international law, should have surfaced and identified itself when pinged by
sonar. But instead, the sub sped up and moved away. The Atago did not have a
helicopter on board to aid in the search, and after 90 minutes, the sub slipped
away.
The sonar
contact did reveal the sub to be, most likely, Russian or Chinese. The Japanese
keep an eye on the choke points the Russians must use to get their subs out to
the ocean, and, without giving anything away, said they did not believe the
boat was Russian. That left the Chinese, who have been sending their subs
farther and farther afield over the last few years. Four years ago, a Chinese
nuclear powered sub was caught in Japanese waters, and the Chinese eventually
apologized for that.
The U.S. has
underwater surveillance systems that cover most of the Pacific, but there was
no public American report on whether any subs had been spotted in that area.
The U.S. is very secretive about their wade area underwater sensor system, so
as not to give any potential enemies useful information on what the system can,
and cannot, track.
The Atago
incident caused Japanese politicians to call for a change in the current laws,
so that Japanese ships can use force (depth charges, or even torpedoes) to go
after subs that are illegally intruding into Japanese waters. But the most
embarrassing aspect of the incident was the inability of the Japanese to track
the intruder. Japanese still remember the starvation of the last year of World
War II (1945), when submarines and naval mines cut off food imports and caused
a deadly famine.
