ABSTRACT
The East Asian seas are the greatest concentration of seas in the world covered by the regime of enclosed and semi-enclosed seas in Part IX of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The significant feature of the maritime geography of East Asia is the chain of off-lying archipelagos and islands, stretching from Sakhalin and the Kamchatka Peninsula through the Japanese archipelago and the Philippines archipelago to the Indonesian archipelago and northern Australia. In the East Asian region, only the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos meet the strict United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) criteria for an archipelagic State, as set out in UNCLOS Articles 46 and 47, relating to the integrity of the archipelago and the ratio of land to water. This geographical picture of concavity along the continental coastline of East Asia and the numerous off-lying archipelagos and islands creates a large array of enclosed or semi-enclosed seas.
