00:00Tensions between Japan and China have intensified over the weekend, with the two countries giving conflicting accounts of an incident involving fighter jets near Okinawa.
00:09For the latest, let's bring in our chief North Asia correspondent, Sivan Engel, in Hong Kong. Siv, what happened?
00:16Well, obviously, this is the hazard of the tensions increasing and neither side really backing down.
00:23So there could have been a, you know, a bit of a disaster, obviously. But the interesting part of this is the two sides have, as you rightfully said, Sherry, conflicting accounts of what actually happened.
00:34So I can give you both accounts. Now, the Japanese essentially says they scrambled their fighter jets, the F-15 fighter jets, when they indicated there was indications that Chinese J-15 fighter jets had come close to Japanese airspace.
00:51Now, the Japanese says this incident happened over international waters. They scrambled their F-15s. And then that's where we get into the Chinese account.
01:01The Chinese account says the Japanese F-15 fighters essentially disrupted their training that they were conducting in international waters off one of their aircraft carriers and created an unsafe environment for their training.
01:18So, again, the Japanese account says they they basically the Chinese had done fire control radar.
01:26They locked in on the Japanese jets on two different occasions on Saturday morning and then Saturday afternoon.
01:35Now, this is what the Chinese foreign ministry in a statement says under the current circumstance,
01:40the Japanese side, the Japanese side, by hyping up the so-called issue of radar illumination.
01:45That is essentially fire control radar locking in on the jets.
01:49They're claiming that Japan is hyping this up, is deliberately making a false accusation against China to build up tension and mislead the international community.
01:59It is purely ill-intentioned, according to the Chinese.
02:04Now, Takeichi-san, the Japanese prime minister, said this is an extremely unfortunate situation.
02:11We strongly protested to China and demanded measures to prevent any reoccurrence.
02:16We will respond calmly and firmly.
02:20But again, the Chinese have a different account of that.
02:23They still are demanding an apology from Takeichi-san regarding her comments last month regarding Taiwan and also a retraction of those comments.
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