About 100 Chinese fishing boats suspected of poaching coral were headed back to the waters off the Ogasawara Islands on Friday morning after sheltering from a passing typhoon, a Japan Coast Guard spokesman said in Tokyo.

But about 100 boats apparently engaged in similar theft near the Izu Islands had dispersed as the typhoon approached, the spokesman said.

The coral poachers have highlighted the nation’s inability to deal with such a broad incursion at a time when the Coast Guard is deploying its assets off the Senkaku islets of the East China Sea.

The Senkakus are claimed by China and Taiwan. Beijing, which calls them Diaoyu, has maintained a nearly constant patrol presence in waters nearby, tying up Japan’s resources.

In fact, the Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper has reported that only three Coast Guard patrol vessels and another two ships of the Fisheries Agency have been deployed in the waters around the Ogasawara and the Izu Islands to check for Chinese poachers. The Ogasawara group of islands is 1,000 km from Tokyo; the Izu Islands are significantly closer to the mainland.

The Coast Guard spokesman declined on Friday to comment on the number of patrol ships that have been deployed over the matter.The Coast Guard has access to 124 patrol ships and 238 smaller craft across the country. Only some of the larger vessels are considered powerful enough to intercept and deter ships like those the poachers use, each of which are 100 to 300 tons in size, Coast Guard officials said.

“Beefing up the patrol ships, aircraft and personnel of the Coast Guard is an urgent matter,” said land minister Akihiro Ota, who also heads the Coast Guard, speaking at a news conference on Friday.

Japan’s territorial sea and exclusive economic zones total 4.47 million sq. km, the world’s sixth-largest and 12 times larger than Japan’s landmass.

“Japan’s territorial sea and EEZ is too large for the Coast Guard. You need to fundamentally reform it and create a new, highly mobile system using aircraft,”said Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Tokai University and a noted expert on maritime security.

He said the Coast Guard should be reformed to specialize in defending remote islands and maritime territory, while the police should be tasked with countering minor illegal fishing closer to the coast.

Aircraft like the tilt-rotor Osprey used by the United States military would give the Coast Guard much greater mobility, Yamada added.

Government have said that fines and bail conditions administered for maritime theft are currently too small to deter coral poachers from practicing their lucrative trade.

Fines and bail sums are not officially released, but skyrocketing prices in China for jewelry made of coral — in particular, red coral — are believed to have made it more attractive for many to risk any penalties.

Koya Nishikawa, minister in charge of agriculture, fisheries and forestry, told a news conference on Friday the government will consider drafting a bill to strengthen the punishment for illegal fishing.

“We need to make it into a bill,” Nishikawa said. “The sooner the better.”