Japan puts off State-owned land sale to Chinese consulate amid tension

The Tokai Local Finance Bureau with the Ministry of Finance posted the notice of sale for the 31,000 square-meter area located next to Nagoya Castle for three months from April 15, to which the consulate and Aichi Gakuin University applied, seeking respectively to obtain 10,000 square meters and 21,000 square meters, according to the sources yesterday.

The bureau was planning to finish reviewing the sale plan by September and sign a deal with the parties within this fiscal year ending March, but matters became complicated after a Chinese fishing boat collided with Japan Coast Guard patrol vessels near the Senkaku Islands in September.

As bilateral ties between China and Japan soured after China insisted on its sovereignty over the islands in the East China Sea, opposition grew among local residents and the bureau began to receive dozens of protest emails and calls every day, they said.

''China clearly showed us a hard-line stance in the collision incident and we cannot accept sales of Japanese-owned land when we are already having a territorial dispute,'' said Reiko Hayashi, 63, a company employee in Nagoya who has collected 10,000 petitions against the sale of the land and submitted them to the bureau.

The bureau has subsequently told the university to indefinitely suspend the plan, saying it ''would like to see how things go.'' The plan has effectively been frozen, the sources said.

While noting that the bureau cannot reject the plan as it sees no problem, its officials said they will have to deal with the matter carefully after receiving such ''unexpectedly serious'' protests from residents. They are now uncertain whether the land can actually be sold, they added.

The Chinese consulate has said it has no comment on the matter.In a similar development, the city of Niigata has also suspended the sale of city-owned land to another Chinese consulate due to local opposition following the maritime collisions off the uninhabited islands, called the Diaoyu Islands in China.