Photo/Illutration A base for the Self-Defense Forces under construction on Mageshima island in Kagoshima Prefecture in August (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

A Chinese state-owned enterprise is believed to have offered funding to a Japanese executive in 2019 when the central government was negotiating to buy an uninhabited island from his company to build a base for the Self-Defense Forces.

Isao Tateishi, the representative director of Taston Airport, was offered possible loans and investments when he was invited to Shanghai in September 2019 by the Chinese company, according to sources and a video recording of Tateishi’s remarks.

At the time, the Tokyo-based Taston Airport owned 99 percent of Mageshima island in Kagoshima Prefecture, a strategic national security outpost in southwestern Japan against an increasingly assertive China.

However, negotiations on the island with the Defense Ministry had been stalled over the sales price, and the company was in funding difficulties.

A senior official of the Chinese company met with Tateishi in Tokyo shortly after the meeting in Shanghai.

Yoshitaka Sakurada, former minister in charge of the Tokyo Olympics, apparently sat in on the meeting.

The Asahi Shimbun obtained a photograph that is believed to have been taken at the time.

In an interview, Sakurada said he is shown in the photograph.

“I was probably (at the meeting),” he said. “I do not remember who invited me, but I should have been more careful. I have no idea who the people on the other side are.”

Tateishi died in 2021 at the age of 88.

The Chinese company did not respond to The Asahi Shimbun’s written request for a comment.

In November 2019, the government agreed, in principle, to purchase Mageshima from Taston Airport for about 16 billion yen ($103 million).

Construction of an SDF base there began in January 2023.

Mageshima had been earlier listed as a candidate site for field carrier landing practices for U.S. aircraft in a Japan-U.S. agreement in 2011.

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