The Japanese Island Just 110 km From Taiwan: Yonaguni The Island on the Edge of a War

Yonaguni is the Japanese island just 110 km from Taiwan and 2,000 km from Tokyo. This week, US and Japanese anti-ship missiles are reported to have arrived there for the first time. How did a fishing island of about 1,700 people become one of the most watched places in Asia?

Chapters
0:00 Taiwan on the horizon
0:36 The last stepping stone
1:21 Taiwan's other half: the smuggling years
2:03 From quiet island to military base
2:26 2022: missiles land close by
3:02 On the front line
3:26 Keen Sword 2026
3:58 Six days to evacuate
4:34 Same island, same 110 km


Yonaguni is the last inhabited island in Japan's Nansei (Ryukyu) chain, the line of islands that stands between China's coast and the open Pacific. In this documentary we follow its story: the Ryukyu Kingdom, the years when 95% of its trade was with Taiwan, the post-war smuggling boom, the 2016 radar station, the Chinese missiles that landed in Japan's waters in 2022, PM Takaichi's Taiwan remark and the China–Japan crisis it started, the Keen Sword 2026 exercise, and Japan's plan to evacuate 120,000 people from its southern islands.
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SOURCES
1. Defense News, "US Marine Corps anti-ship weaponry to see exercise action on remote Japan island near Taiwan", 5 Oct 2026
2. Global Times (citing NHK), on the NMESIS deployment to Yonaguni, 2 Oct 2026
3. Eastern Herald, "Keen Sword opens near Taiwan as Yonaguni is told to clear roads", 18 Oct 2026; Antiwar.com, 19 Oct 2026
4. Radio Free Asia, "Yonaguni: Taiwan's satellite island" (special report)
5. Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, testimony "My Life during Yonaguni's Prosperous Era"
6. Al Jazeera, "Chinese missiles suspected of landing in Japan's economic zone", 4 Aug 2022
7. Stars and Stripes, on the Sakishima evacuation plan (1 Apr 2025) and the Yonaguni shelter (2 Jul 2025)
8. Wikipedia, "Yonaguni" and "2025–2026 China–Japan diplomatic crisis" (with their cited reporting)


#yonaguni #taiwan #geopolitics

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