How to Settle the Fight Over Some Guano-Covered Rocks HONG KONG - No matter what they're called by their claimants in China, Japan and Taiwan, the East Asian islands at the center of an angry dispute are little more than remote shards of guano-covered rock. Hardly deserving of the word "islands," they're more like protrusions, more like carbuncles. No people live on them, although you half expect a wizened Japanese soldier to emerge from one of the caves, brandishing his rifle, thinking World War II is still being fought. And in a way, it still is. "Hardly postcard quality" is how my colleague Martin Fackler described the islands after taking a seven-hour boat ride from one of Japan's southernmost ports. The islets are called the Senkakus in Japan, the Diaoyu islands in China and Tiaoyutai in Taiwan. There's no tourism, no military potential, no real strategic value. There's no there there. Still, any negotiated resolution of the volatile dispute seems unlikely. The Japanese far right and choleric Chinese nationalists have been dialing up the volume over the islands, seemingly at times with the unspoken approval of their governments. Conservative Japanese politicians have been driving things from their end, while violent anti-Japanese protests in China have drawn thousands, this in a country where the gathering of a few dozen pro-democracy activists would bring out battalions of helmeted riot police, undercover cops and paddy wagons. The real dispute over the islands is not about oil, gas, sea lanes or fishing rights. Instead, the prevailing emotion is a leftover bitterness from the war, combined with the prevailing image of an insufficiently repentant Japan. As the analyst Daniel Sneider told Rendezvous, "It's not about territory. It's not about these rocks. It's about much, much more. It's identity, first and foremost. It's pride. In the face of deeply abiding emotions and official intransigence, it seems unlikely that Beijing, Tokyo and Taipei might simply agree to a radically simple settlement: All three nations would stand down and renounce their claims, thereby settling things. Nobody would win, so nobody would lose. It would require a bold new kind of diplomacy, but the Senkaku/Diaoyu rocks could be established as a kind of "international zone" surrounded, say, by a 12-mile cordon sanitaire. The islets would belong to no specific nation, much like the legal status of the Moon. No fishing or tourist boats would be allowed to encroach. No military drilling, no oil drilling. Birds would flock, coral would grow. And in the spirit of the negotiated settlement, the currently unmanned lighthouse on Uotsuri, the principal islet, could be occupied by a trilateral rotation of keepers. There are established venues for a binding legal settlement, of course, venues that would tamp down the regional tension while giving political cover to the ideologues and fanatics. In "Learning to Play Chess on Water," a valuable history of maritime-boundary law and dispute resolution, the attorney and Stanford lecturer Jonathan D. Greenberg discusses the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and other courts in settling fights like the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue: The ICJ and other tribunals can enable states, unable to achieve a negotiated settlement of differences, to delimit maritime boundaries by means of legal processes, principles and judgments, in furtherance of international rule of law. They also offer politicians a "way out" of domestic political dilemmas; i.e., they allow state leaders to achieve solutions to economically-costly disputes while, at the same time, saving face (and thereby increasing the chance they will keep their job). A political leader can claim to domestic constituencies that he or she "has never and will never compromise the nation's sovereign rights." If a disputing state loses its claim in court, the politician can blame the tribunal, explaining that he or she has no choice but to carry out its judgment, and the case is closed. The repercussions are at least arguably less severe than the price a politician must pay for unilateral concessions. Boundary and sovereignty disputes have long been part of the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, established by the U.N. Charter as "the principal judicial organ of the United Nations." China and Japan currently have judges on the court, but Taiwan does not. The 15-member court is based in The Hague. A 2009 court judgment on the maritime boundary between Ukraine and Romania in the Black Sea "provides extremely useful guidance to states embroiled in sovereignty and boundary disputes about the delimitation effects of small, uninhabited islets," Mr. Greenberg said in his piece in the Harvard International Review. He said the decision has "extremely useful potential application to the ongoing conflicts in the South China Sea" and other similar cases. There are other legal avenues for the claimants, and Beijing said earlier this month it plans to claim the Diaoyus under provisions in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or Unclos. The State Oceanic Administration in Beijing has been preparing documents that it says will show China's continental shelf extends far out to sea and includes the contested islands. The provision is not as arcane as it might sound: It has recently come into play in the Arctic Ocean, where the Lomonsov Ridge, a vast underwater mountain range, has been claimed by Russia, Canada and Denmark. Michael Byers, a professor of international law at the University of British Columbia, told Lauren Morello of ClimateWire that the dispute will likely be settled by the geological facts on the ground. Or, in this case, the facts under the water. "Under Article 76 of Unclos, the issue of the extended continental shelf is not something resolved by power or politics," Mr. Byers said. You cannot change the shape or the sediments of the seabed. Those are scientific facts. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a court under the Unclos umbrella, might serve as yet another arbiter of the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. That tribunal, based in Hamburg, Germany, has 21 members. China has a judge on the tribunal, but the president is Shunji Yanai, a Japanese jurist and an expert in maritime law. His term lasts until October 2014.