China has been one of the few countries who are claiming that some pieces of lands around it are theirs. They have disputes with the Philippines, Japan, and other countries off of the Southeastern coast. While there are some maritime arguments happening between Japan and China, one thing that Japan needed last was losing an island. Yes, you heard it right, Japan lost an island last year and it’s mysterious.
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What island was lost?
Along the northern part of Hokkaido, Japan, the island Esanbe Hanakita Kojima is existent. It was named as an official island in the year 2014 as it was located around 500 meters off of the northern mainland of Hokkaido Japan in Sarufutsu sitting on the Sea of Okhotsk.
Esanbe is part of the many uninhabited islands in Japan which were made official islands by the Japanese government in the year 2014. There are a total of 158 islands that are not lived on in Japan.
As strange as it may seem, Esanbe Hanakita Kojima has been seen last since September and no one else, even the Japanese Coast Guard are able to locate it since then.
They’ve ran different strategic searches to try and look for the island but to no avail, they were not able to do so.
The Japanese Coast Guard said that during the time that the island was last surveyed in the year 1987, it came out that it was just 1.4 meters above the surface. This simply means that it could have possible been eroded by drift ice and the wind along the Sea of Okhotsk where it was before.
Hiroshi Shimizu, an author who visited a nearby Sarufutsu village because he ought to write a connecting story for his prequel book which was about the different hidden islands in Japan when he was able to notice that the island magically disappeared.
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Shimizu told the local fishing cooperative about this and they immediately sent out a flotilla to its former location and confirmed that it really had disappeared.
Five feet above sea level
Japanese officials, because of this certain incident, now believes that the island that was once above the sea level by five (5) feet, was broken and hidden by the ice that covers the area through the bitter winter and the strong winds around it.
When it was still existing, the island is in argument of the western indent and is part of the islands that Russia is claiming to be theirs. Russia is saying that the archipelago is theirs and its name is the Kuril islands.
However, last 2014, the island was officially named by Tokyo as part of its attempts to reinforce legal and valid control over the hundred outlying islands in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ); that quieting thing about it is that it just disappeared in thin air and without a trace.
The Japanese coastguards in the area were given the directive to hold out a survey and an observation in the area to thoroughly check if there are any type of remnant or memory that the island that left, has left behind.
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Why did this happen?
Although it was not clear on what happened, The Guardian made a confirmation that the ice and the winds in the area eroded the very island and erased it off of the maps for good. Japan isn’t the only country losing islands; in fact, a piece of the United States of America (U.S.A.) has been erased from the map also.
This island is a remote strip of land in Hawaii and its cause? Well, it was the Walaka Hurricane which happened in October of year 2018.
Don’t be saddened because Esanbe Hanakita Kojima is now in peace and no one lives there, anyways. However, this is just one of the things that prove mother nature can do whatever she wants in just even a snap of a finger.
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There are a few hundred hidden and uninhabited islands in Japan so there would be a lot of removing that’s going to happen in the near future. Kidding aside, the fact that Japan lost an island is a clear indication that the water levels are rising and that it could be because of the unsteady climate that we have.
