Japan’s defense ministry, in a likely harbinger of rising tensions with Communist China, says that a Chinese intelligence plane violated Japanese air space surrounding a small island grouping off its southwestern coast.

The Chinese Y9 aircraft was within Japan’s space around the Danjo islands for two minutes, long enough for Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force to scramble jets in a warning for the People’s Republic of China against repeating flights into Japanese territory, which extends 12 miles off all its coastlines.

While Chinese planes often fly into Japan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, covering much of the East China Sea, the ministry said that only once previously has a Chinese plane breached Japan’s territorial limit. Chinese planes and ships often venture by air and sea over and around another grouping, the Senkaku Islands, long claimed by Beijing as Chinese territory

Japan’s Kyodo news agency said Japan’s vice foreign minister, Masataka Okano, had lodged “an extremely serious protest” with  the Chinese chargé warning that such an incident should “never happen again.”

The intrusion into Japanese airspace, 100 miles from the southwestern prefecture of Nagasaki, raised the possibility that China might target the Drano Islands just as they’ve long harassed the Senkakus, 137 miles north of Taiwan. While the incursions around the Senkakus reflect China’s territorial claims to the islands, the Chinese do not claim the Danjo islands. Like the Senkakus, the Danjo islands are uninhabited but of strategic importance in terms of Japan’s defense.

China’s communist camarilla ordered the flight after Washington and Tokyo had announced plans to form a unified defense command to ensure close coordination in the event of conflict breaking out in the region. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has ordered frequent tests of missiles landing in the waters between the Korean peninsula and Japan — and even long-range missiles flying over Japan into the northern Pacific. 

The Chinese flight over a small portion of Japanese territory  coincided with the political maneuvering for a successor to Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, who has announced he’s stepping down next month. The choice revolves around the election of leader of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, whom LDP members of the Diet, or parliament, will elect unanimously as prime minister.

So far a former  defense minister, Shigeu Ishiba, is ahead in the polls. Whoever wins, the government is expected to want to build on “the spirit of Camp David“ where President  Biden hosted both Mr.  Kishida and South Korea’s president, Yoon Seok-yul, a year ago  in order to ensure close cooperation against their common communist foes, China and North Korea.