Okinotori
reef
Okinotori Island (沖ノ鳥島, Okinotori-shima), or Parece Vela, is a coral reef, geologically an atoll, with two rocks enlarged with tetrapod-cement structures. It is administered by Japan with a total shoal area of 8,482 m2 (2.10 acres) and land area 9.44 m2 (101.6 ft2). Its dry land area is mostly made up by three concrete encasings and there is a 100 by 50 m (330 by 160 ft) stilt platform in the lagoon housing a research station. There is a third completely artificial tetrapod-cement islet.
Okinotori is located on the Palau–Kyushu Ridge in the Philippine Sea, 534 km (332 mi) southeast of Okidaitōjima and 567 km (352 mi) west-southwest of South Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands or 1,740 km (1,080 mi) south of Tokyo, Japan. Okinotori is the southernmost part of Japan and the only Japanese territory south of the Tropic of Cancer.
Japan argues that Okinotori is significant enough for it to claim a 200 nmi (370 km) exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around it, but China, South Korea, and Taiwan dispute the Japanese EEZ, saying that the atoll does not meet the definition of an island under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
History
The atoll may have been sighted first by Spanish sailor Bernardo de la Torre in 1543, although the first undisputed sighting was by Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565. Its first recorded name was Parece Vela (Spanish for "looks like a sail", alluding to the original appearance of the reef). This name has been retained in English as well, especially to designate the geological formations of the islets.
“Okinotori” enters the record as reef. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Okinotori and reef can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q908529. VIAF identifies the subject as 257870985. Authority coordinates are 20.422, 136.090. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1543 and 1565.
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This entry incorporates text from “Okinotori” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.