Senkakus: who rammed who?

Here is a still from the second time the Chinese fishing vessel rammed one of the Japanese ships in the Senkakus in September. If you watch the sequence of the ramming from about :50 to about 1:20 in the video, it is easy to see who did what. (1) As the Chinese vessel changes course the Japanese voices rise to a scream. What are they reacting to? Ok, so maybe that is fake, the Japanese are coordinating. (2) As the Chinese boat changes course, you can see the vessel tilting as it turns sharply. Ok, so maybe that is just a wave. But then there is (3) -- if you look at the wake of the Chinese vessel (red box), it is clearly curved, and toward the Japanese vessel, meaning that the Chinese vessel executed a turn toward the Japanese vessel. There should be no doubt about who rammed who ( the first incident, ~2:16, is even clearer).

Ok, so maybe it wasn't intentional.

Now go back and watch the crew carefully. From about :50 on there are six men visible near the pilothouse, five outside and one inside driving. At :57 the five are still outside. But around 1:06, as the boat executes its course change, the men all go inside the cabin.

They know what is coming.

As Lyle Goldstein put it in his excellent piece on Chinese fishing boats:

Finally, there is the strong likelihood that Beijing will continue to use the Chinese strategy of "defeating harshness with kindness" (yi rou ke gang) and thus deploying unarmed fishing vessels or fisheries enforcement vessels to confront foreign vessels operating in its EEZ and claimed waters.

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