Last week, a massive container ship wedged itself between both banks of the Suez Canal in Egypt, completely blocking the waterway and affecting 10% of the world’s trade traffic. I could not keep silent about the matter, having been to the canal several times, as I spent two years beginning in 1979 in Cairo studying Arabic during my training stage at the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

It was indeed a perfect diplomatic dilemma: The container ship was a Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, German-managed, Panamanian-flagged and Indian-manned behemoth of a vessel that now finds itself under Egyptian jurisdiction. I cannot think of any other maritime crises more complicated and multi-faceted than this one.

With that said, international reactions to this tragic event were ambivalent at best, if not chaotic. Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato, for example, said “The incident’s possible impact on Japan is limited with no specific influence on the nation’s stable energy supply. Still, we must keep an eye on the prices in the market.”