The Pacific Ocean has an area of 180 million square kilometers, making it the largest, deepest and the most islands on the earth. Because of its geographical location between Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and North and South America, even isolated islands or uninhabited islands have attracted much attention. From the colonial period to the First and Second World Wars, all strategically significant Pacific islands were "claimed" and only one world heritage site was listed as an archipelago to the United States, Britain, Spain and Japan successively declared sovereignty.
Ogasawara Islands, which are more than 1,000 kilometers away from Tokyo, Japan, are marked as Bonin Islands on the map of Britain, the United States and the West. The reason why such a big difference can occur in the modern world map is that Britain, the United States, Japan and the West have all declared sovereignty over this archipelago, because everyone has taken a fancy to the strategic location of the Ogasawara Islands, and even Britain and the United States have tried to immigrate to settle.
Ogasawara Archipelago total area is less than 80 square kilometers, but the sporadic distribution of more than 30 islands reaches a straight line distance of 1,900 kilometers. In other words, owning the Ogasawara Archipelago is equivalent to having the exclusive Pacific economic zone of thousands of square kilometers, which is a super wealth in peacetime. However, Britain and the United States are more concerned about the strategic significance of the Ogasawara Islands. This is also the main reason why the United States dispatched two fleets to occupy the islands twice during World War II. The Japanese army paid the price of losing more than 300 aircraft and a whole escort formation.
The Battle of Ogasawara Islands is " Battle of Iwo Jima ". The famous deed is that former President Bush, who was then a US pilot, was shot down when he participated in an air combat. He relied on the liferaft dropped by his comrades in advance to row towards the father island in the Ogasawara Islands. Finally, he encountered the US submarine " Falcon " rescued, and all the other eight pilots were captured and died on the father island. This is also the main reason why the BBC once mentioned that after Bush took office in 1988, Japan paid the economic contraction in the 1930s.
Ogasawara Archipelago The history of the Ogasawara Archipelago has caused many disputes on the grounds. Looking through records from various countries, you can find many interesting things. Among them, the three countries agree that the first recorded visitor to the archipelago was the Spanish navigator Latorre in 1543, when there was no one inhabitant on the archipelago; while the Japanese showed "confirm" evidence (later overturned as a fraud) that there were Japanese inhabitants in the prehistoric period. The real Japanese historical record was the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1670. It is said that fishermen were blown to the archipelago by a typhoon and reported to the shogunate before leaving a record after returning to China.
by chance, Latorre, the first Spanish navigator to land on the island, misremembered the latitude in the log, causing the Spanish colonists to miss the archipelago until the American captain Coffin passed by twice and recorded the coordinates accurately for the first time in 1824. What's more coincidental is that a year later, the British whaling ship also came to the archipelago. Captain William had a vision to leave two British crew members and informed countries around the world in the name of King George IV. Therefore, in 1830, the British Navy stationed in Sandwich (now Hawaii) immigrated more than a hundred young men and women in two times. It can be said that the ancestors of the Ogasawara Islands were actually Westerners (the first batch of permanent residents).
At that time, the Tokugawa shogunate was growing in Japan and sent a navy to make maps and immigrate a small number of Japanese. It was stopped by Britain and the West after learning about it. However, none of the countries have invested and developed the remote Ogasawara Islands and actually garrisoned the remote Ogasawara Islands. When the Russian painter Brick wandered to the Ogasawara Islands in 1920, there was only less than 100 people on the island. Since the residents Brick met were fluent in English, the Ogasawara Islands were also written as the Boning Islands in their works, adding another evidence to the United Kingdom and Spain.
Ogasawara Islands were occupied by the US military for 22 years after World War II. One of the British-American officers believed that these English-speaking islanders should get American identity and enjoy American benefits. As a result, these residents couldn't wait to climb onto the US Navy ship and moved to the United States. The originally lower proportion of Japanese immigrants became the "mainstream nation."After comparing other islands such as Okinawa , the US military chose to incorporate the garrison into Okinawa and handed over the archipelago to Japan for jurisdiction, losing this archipelago with great strategic significance in the Pacific.
But Spain and the United Kingdom did not give up. Since then, they have repeatedly requested Japan to return the archipelago, while Japan regards the submission of the United States as a reason. The quarrel between the four countries has lasted for decades. Interestingly, the Ogasawara Archipelago has never been polluted because it is far away from the mainland. The unique species on the island also attracted the attention of scientists. In the end, it was successfully applied for the World Heritage List in this name, which is equivalent to , the United Nations also recognized that the archipelago belongs to Japan. Therefore, the United States, Britain and Spain could only swallow this breath, but the navigation charts and records of various countries were called Boning Island, which is equivalent to the meaning that it does not recognize!
