Okinotorishima

In 1931, Japan declared an uninhabited atoll – located more than a 1 000 km south-east of Okinawa – Japanese territory, placing it under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo Metropolis, and naming it Okinotorishima. These barren rocks give Japan control over more than 400 000 square km of the sea  in their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This is an area larger than the Baltic ocean and potentially rich in oil, manganese, natural gas, fish and control over important maritime trade.

There are two problems though since according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is "a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide" and "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.". Japan have to prove that there occurs sustained economic life and ensure that the naturally formed rocks remain above the water at high tide, but Typhoons erodes the rocks and they would have been completely gone today if the Japanese government would not have acted. 

To solve this, between 1987 and 1993 the government of Tokyo and later the central government built a titanium net, concrete wave breakers shaped like tetrapods and steel and concrete walls to stop the erosion of natural Okinotorishima rocks, and a research facility that looks like an oil platform, at at total cost of about 600 million USDfrom 1987 up to today. Regular fishing expeditions are launched around the islands to back up the claims of economic life. The result is strange looking concentric cakes of concrete, steel and titanium, a weird land art that artificially protects small natural rocks that from the beginning were a stretch to call islands but like magic stones give immense power over the seas and their resources.