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Yes, another one. What are you going to do? 
It does seem that the Chinese are being deliberately belligerant in these issues. I don't think I've seen China make any constructive effort to improve relations. For a country that demands sensitivity toward its own culture and controversial issues, I've always been surprised by the complete lack of it regarding China's treatment of other countries cultural issues. You see this clearly in reading newpaper articles about students who have returned from abroad. The articles are a long complaint about how foreign countries don't do things the Chinese way and are thus rude and ignorant. I've yet to see an article differ from this pattern in both national and school-run newspapers.
Koizumi does seem to be a problem, however. One wonders if he is even aware of what's going on around him. A few simple, but well-meaning, gestures from him, ie the shrine, could either greatly improve relations or at least remove one of China's complaints. Given China's attitude, I doubt that the first will occur, and the latter will probably just be replaced with something else, which may be a reason why Koizumi contniues his visits. China's usual response to receiving concessions is to demand more.
I can see how difficult this situation must be. Japan needs to do something about these post-war conflicts. But China's belligerance makes it seemingly impossible and even a little foolish to do so. As for the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in Japan, China truly has only itself to blame.
Relations Fray as Japan Criticizes Chinese Official's Snub
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: May 25, 2005
TOKYO, May 24 - Japanese officials sharply criticized China on Tuesday for canceling a meeting with Japan's prime minister on Monday and predicted that the incident would sharpen growing anti-Chinese sentiment here.
In a land where courtesy is prized, Japanese ministers made little effort to mask their anger at the abrupt departure on Monday of Wu Yi, a Chinese vice premier, who had come to Japan to ease relations strained by disputes over textbooks, territorial rights and anti-Japanese protests in China.
"There is not even a word of apology over the sudden cancellation," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said. "Such things go against human society."
He added: "Regrettably, this gives me the impression that there is a considerable gap" between China's intentions to improve relations, and its actions. One of five Japanese ministers to publicly criticize China on Tuesday, he reminded reporters that it had been China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, who had requested the meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Taro Aso, Japan's internal affairs minister, bluntly warned, "This will contribute to a worsening of Japanese sentiment toward China."
Chinese officials, who at first attributed Ms. Wu's early departure to her need to attend to "urgent official duties," were clear on Tuesday that the cancellation stemmed from sensitivities surrounding a shrine that honors Japanese war dead, including 14 "Class A" war criminals who were executed after World War II.
"To our regret, during Vice Premier Wu Yi's stay in Japan, Japanese leaders repeatedly made remarks on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine that go against the efforts to improve Sino-Japanese relations," said Kong Quan, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, in comments released by the official New China News Agency on Tuesday morning. "China is extremely dissatisfied with it."
The shrine has been a constant source of irritation to China, which was brutally colonized by Japan during the war.
The Chinese explanation appeared to fall on deaf ears here, with several observers pointing out that the move seemed calculated to inflict the maximum degree of humiliation. Ms. Wu, they said, met with Japanese business leaders, natural allies of China, just hours before snubbing Mr. Koizumi, who has visited the shrine yearly since 2001 and has so far resisted suggestions that he stop.
"China is cultivating those in Japan known to be sympathetic to China, while being pointedly contemptuous of Koizumi," Robyn Lim, a professor of international relations at Nanzan University in Nagoya, said Tuesday.
If Beijing's aim is to discredit Mr. Koizumi and other conservative nationalists like Shinzo Abe, who is seen as a likely successor in 2006, she added, "That will very likely backfire and help ensure that the strongly anti-China Shinzo Abe succeeds Koizumi."
The backlash may already be taking place, even in the business arena, where last year China accounted for about a fifth, or $213 billion, of Japan's total trade, making it Japan's largest trading partner.
In the wake of the anti-Japanese protests, Teikoku Databank Ltd., a Tokyo-based credit research company, polled 6,906 Japanese companies about their assessment of the riskiness of doing business in China.
Two-thirds said they had concerns about investing in China, while another 13.5 percent said they had serious concerns about the economic impact of anti-Japanese attitudes. Of companies with concrete plans to invest in China, about 30 percent said they were considering putting off their investment plans.
In April anti-Chinese feelings were inflamed here after a series of protests in China against Japanese history textbooks that play down atrocities Japan committed in China during the war and against Mr. Koizumi's visits to the shrine. In a country as tightly controlled as China, the protests - which degenerated into vandalism against Japanese businesses and government buildings in Shanghai - were widely seen as officially sanctioned.
In a poll of 1,880 Japanese in mid-May, 92 percent said they were dissatisfied with Beijing's refusal to apologize for the vandalism. In the poll, conducted for Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative newspaper, 85 percent said Mr. Koizumi should demand an apology, 74 percent said they were concerned about the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing and 77 percent said Japan should be more assertive in a dispute with China over gas deposits and an island group in the East China Sea.
On the question of Yasukuni, 48 percent said they supported the prime minister's visits, while 45 percent were opposed.
In another sign of the times, the Japan-China Friendship Association, a 55-year-old cultural group, bowed to right-wing threats and did not hold its annual convention in a provincial town as scheduled last weekend. Instead, the convention has been postponed for six months and will be in Tokyo, deemed a safer location.
On Tuesday, Katsuya Okada, head of the main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, criticized Mr. Koizumi's insistence on visiting the shrine, acknowledging that it "was a big factor in Vice Premier Wu's decision to cancel."
"If I become prime minister, I will not visit Yasukuni Shrine," Mr. Okada told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. In the last half-century, opposition groups have held power only once in Japan, from 1993 to 1996.
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: May 25, 2005
TOKYO, May 24 - Japanese officials sharply criticized China on Tuesday for canceling a meeting with Japan's prime minister on Monday and predicted that the incident would sharpen growing anti-Chinese sentiment here.
In a land where courtesy is prized, Japanese ministers made little effort to mask their anger at the abrupt departure on Monday of Wu Yi, a Chinese vice premier, who had come to Japan to ease relations strained by disputes over textbooks, territorial rights and anti-Japanese protests in China.
"There is not even a word of apology over the sudden cancellation," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said. "Such things go against human society."
He added: "Regrettably, this gives me the impression that there is a considerable gap" between China's intentions to improve relations, and its actions. One of five Japanese ministers to publicly criticize China on Tuesday, he reminded reporters that it had been China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, who had requested the meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Taro Aso, Japan's internal affairs minister, bluntly warned, "This will contribute to a worsening of Japanese sentiment toward China."
Chinese officials, who at first attributed Ms. Wu's early departure to her need to attend to "urgent official duties," were clear on Tuesday that the cancellation stemmed from sensitivities surrounding a shrine that honors Japanese war dead, including 14 "Class A" war criminals who were executed after World War II.
"To our regret, during Vice Premier Wu Yi's stay in Japan, Japanese leaders repeatedly made remarks on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine that go against the efforts to improve Sino-Japanese relations," said Kong Quan, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, in comments released by the official New China News Agency on Tuesday morning. "China is extremely dissatisfied with it."
The shrine has been a constant source of irritation to China, which was brutally colonized by Japan during the war.
The Chinese explanation appeared to fall on deaf ears here, with several observers pointing out that the move seemed calculated to inflict the maximum degree of humiliation. Ms. Wu, they said, met with Japanese business leaders, natural allies of China, just hours before snubbing Mr. Koizumi, who has visited the shrine yearly since 2001 and has so far resisted suggestions that he stop.
"China is cultivating those in Japan known to be sympathetic to China, while being pointedly contemptuous of Koizumi," Robyn Lim, a professor of international relations at Nanzan University in Nagoya, said Tuesday.
If Beijing's aim is to discredit Mr. Koizumi and other conservative nationalists like Shinzo Abe, who is seen as a likely successor in 2006, she added, "That will very likely backfire and help ensure that the strongly anti-China Shinzo Abe succeeds Koizumi."
The backlash may already be taking place, even in the business arena, where last year China accounted for about a fifth, or $213 billion, of Japan's total trade, making it Japan's largest trading partner.
In the wake of the anti-Japanese protests, Teikoku Databank Ltd., a Tokyo-based credit research company, polled 6,906 Japanese companies about their assessment of the riskiness of doing business in China.
Two-thirds said they had concerns about investing in China, while another 13.5 percent said they had serious concerns about the economic impact of anti-Japanese attitudes. Of companies with concrete plans to invest in China, about 30 percent said they were considering putting off their investment plans.
In April anti-Chinese feelings were inflamed here after a series of protests in China against Japanese history textbooks that play down atrocities Japan committed in China during the war and against Mr. Koizumi's visits to the shrine. In a country as tightly controlled as China, the protests - which degenerated into vandalism against Japanese businesses and government buildings in Shanghai - were widely seen as officially sanctioned.
In a poll of 1,880 Japanese in mid-May, 92 percent said they were dissatisfied with Beijing's refusal to apologize for the vandalism. In the poll, conducted for Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative newspaper, 85 percent said Mr. Koizumi should demand an apology, 74 percent said they were concerned about the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing and 77 percent said Japan should be more assertive in a dispute with China over gas deposits and an island group in the East China Sea.
On the question of Yasukuni, 48 percent said they supported the prime minister's visits, while 45 percent were opposed.
In another sign of the times, the Japan-China Friendship Association, a 55-year-old cultural group, bowed to right-wing threats and did not hold its annual convention in a provincial town as scheduled last weekend. Instead, the convention has been postponed for six months and will be in Tokyo, deemed a safer location.
On Tuesday, Katsuya Okada, head of the main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, criticized Mr. Koizumi's insistence on visiting the shrine, acknowledging that it "was a big factor in Vice Premier Wu's decision to cancel."
"If I become prime minister, I will not visit Yasukuni Shrine," Mr. Okada told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. In the last half-century, opposition groups have held power only once in Japan, from 1993 to 1996.
Singapore Tries to Calm the Japan-China Diplomatic Dispute
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: May 25, 2005
TOKYO, May 25 - Tiny Singapore stepped forward today to counsel peace between Asia's quarrelling giants, China and Japan.
"The two countries have not reconciled and come to terms with the history of the Second World War, the way Germany and France have done," Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told Japanese business leaders here. "So some friction is inevitable as both enlarge their influence regionally and internationally. But a collision is not inevitable, because both governments see the benefits of cooperation and neither wants a conflict."
With the 60th anniversary looming of Japan's World War II surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, China is peppering this season of historical retrospection with objections over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizuimi's annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine, a Shinto sanctuary historically associated with Japanese militarism. Today, the Chinese news media implied that the Japanese leader's defense of his shrine visits had prompted a Chinese vice premier, Wu Yi, to abruptly cancel a meeting with him in Tokyo on Monday.
"Such annual calls at Yasukuni have put mutual visits of top government leaders between China and Japan on hold," The China Daily, a government-owned newspaper widely read by foreigners in China, said in an editorial.
But with Japan and China scheduled to meet next week in Beijing over a disputed gas deposit in the East China Sea, the Singapore prime minister counseled reconciliation between the two economic partners, which last year recorded bilateral trade of $213 billion.
"Both sides need to moderate nationalist sentiment, manage territorial and other disputes that arise, and find ways to gradually defuse the issue and work toward reconciliation," Mr. Lee said at a forum on the future of Asia sponsored by The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's leading business newspaper.
Mr. Lee, a critic of the shrine visits but also a supporter of Japan's bid to join the United Nations Security Council, added that toning down nationalism "will also help Japan to make a fuller contribution internationally and take its rightful role amongst the community of nations."
Official Japan also sought to turn down the heat.
"Commenting further would not be constructive for Japan-China relations, so I will not comment," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said at a news conference today. "It is our objective to remove the various problems that lie between Japan and China and to develop our relations. I think the same goes for China."
But some Chinese newspapers continued to attack Japan today, citing Prime Minister Koizumi's apology last month for World War II excesses by Japanese troops.
"What does this apology mean to Koizumi?" the English-language China Daily News asked. "An empty apology cannot blow away the clouds that are hanging over bilateral relations."
"While warning other countries against interfering with his Yasukuni visits, Koizumi knows well what these visits mean," the newspaper continued. "But he is still determined to go, and his country's deteriorating relationships with neighboring countries do not stop him."
In an editorial titled, "Respecting history is the precondition of China-Japan relations," the mass-circulation Beijing News demanded: "What we would like to see now is sincerity from the Japanese government, and it should be reflected in action rather than just words."
But many Chinese newspapers have not reported the vice premier's snub, apparently out of fear of stirring up a repeat of last month's anti-Japanese protests and riots. The New China News Agency ran a report in English, but not in Chinese.
Monday's cancellation caught Japan off guard. The Chinese had requested the meeting with the Japanese prime minister and Japanese officials had made it known that they planned to use the meeting to announce that Japan would expand its Chinese group visa program to all of China.
"My reading is that they planned the snub some time in advance, and that it was very well choreographed," Robert Dujarric, an American research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, said today. "More and more, it is clear to me that the Chinese are not into solving the Yasukuni issue. They are into getting something out it. They are into making Japan look badly."
In the wake of the controversy, Japan's stock market has fallen lightly, dragged down 1.1 percent today by exporters, steel makers, shipping companies and other companies with China-related businesses. At the same time, Japan's news media has given prominence to the moderate foreign policy views of Yasuo Fukuda, a former chief cabinet secretary and contender to succeed Mr. Koizumi who plans to step down in September 2006.
"Maybe the Chinese are saying that Koizumi is hopeless, and now they want to play the business lobby against Koizumi," Mr. Dujarric, an American, said, recalling Ms. Wu's speech Monday before a business group here and her lunch with the chairman of the Nihon Keidanren, the nation's most powerful business group. "By making getting things bad and getting Keidanren to complain, they could be saying 'we can do regime change and get our man elected Prime Minister.' That would be an impressive coup."
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: May 25, 2005
TOKYO, May 25 - Tiny Singapore stepped forward today to counsel peace between Asia's quarrelling giants, China and Japan.
"The two countries have not reconciled and come to terms with the history of the Second World War, the way Germany and France have done," Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told Japanese business leaders here. "So some friction is inevitable as both enlarge their influence regionally and internationally. But a collision is not inevitable, because both governments see the benefits of cooperation and neither wants a conflict."
With the 60th anniversary looming of Japan's World War II surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, China is peppering this season of historical retrospection with objections over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizuimi's annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine, a Shinto sanctuary historically associated with Japanese militarism. Today, the Chinese news media implied that the Japanese leader's defense of his shrine visits had prompted a Chinese vice premier, Wu Yi, to abruptly cancel a meeting with him in Tokyo on Monday.
"Such annual calls at Yasukuni have put mutual visits of top government leaders between China and Japan on hold," The China Daily, a government-owned newspaper widely read by foreigners in China, said in an editorial.
But with Japan and China scheduled to meet next week in Beijing over a disputed gas deposit in the East China Sea, the Singapore prime minister counseled reconciliation between the two economic partners, which last year recorded bilateral trade of $213 billion.
"Both sides need to moderate nationalist sentiment, manage territorial and other disputes that arise, and find ways to gradually defuse the issue and work toward reconciliation," Mr. Lee said at a forum on the future of Asia sponsored by The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's leading business newspaper.
Mr. Lee, a critic of the shrine visits but also a supporter of Japan's bid to join the United Nations Security Council, added that toning down nationalism "will also help Japan to make a fuller contribution internationally and take its rightful role amongst the community of nations."
Official Japan also sought to turn down the heat.
"Commenting further would not be constructive for Japan-China relations, so I will not comment," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said at a news conference today. "It is our objective to remove the various problems that lie between Japan and China and to develop our relations. I think the same goes for China."
But some Chinese newspapers continued to attack Japan today, citing Prime Minister Koizumi's apology last month for World War II excesses by Japanese troops.
"What does this apology mean to Koizumi?" the English-language China Daily News asked. "An empty apology cannot blow away the clouds that are hanging over bilateral relations."
"While warning other countries against interfering with his Yasukuni visits, Koizumi knows well what these visits mean," the newspaper continued. "But he is still determined to go, and his country's deteriorating relationships with neighboring countries do not stop him."
In an editorial titled, "Respecting history is the precondition of China-Japan relations," the mass-circulation Beijing News demanded: "What we would like to see now is sincerity from the Japanese government, and it should be reflected in action rather than just words."
But many Chinese newspapers have not reported the vice premier's snub, apparently out of fear of stirring up a repeat of last month's anti-Japanese protests and riots. The New China News Agency ran a report in English, but not in Chinese.
Monday's cancellation caught Japan off guard. The Chinese had requested the meeting with the Japanese prime minister and Japanese officials had made it known that they planned to use the meeting to announce that Japan would expand its Chinese group visa program to all of China.
"My reading is that they planned the snub some time in advance, and that it was very well choreographed," Robert Dujarric, an American research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, said today. "More and more, it is clear to me that the Chinese are not into solving the Yasukuni issue. They are into getting something out it. They are into making Japan look badly."
In the wake of the controversy, Japan's stock market has fallen lightly, dragged down 1.1 percent today by exporters, steel makers, shipping companies and other companies with China-related businesses. At the same time, Japan's news media has given prominence to the moderate foreign policy views of Yasuo Fukuda, a former chief cabinet secretary and contender to succeed Mr. Koizumi who plans to step down in September 2006.
"Maybe the Chinese are saying that Koizumi is hopeless, and now they want to play the business lobby against Koizumi," Mr. Dujarric, an American, said, recalling Ms. Wu's speech Monday before a business group here and her lunch with the chairman of the Nihon Keidanren, the nation's most powerful business group. "By making getting things bad and getting Keidanren to complain, they could be saying 'we can do regime change and get our man elected Prime Minister.' That would be an impressive coup."
Koizumi does seem to be a problem, however. One wonders if he is even aware of what's going on around him. A few simple, but well-meaning, gestures from him, ie the shrine, could either greatly improve relations or at least remove one of China's complaints. Given China's attitude, I doubt that the first will occur, and the latter will probably just be replaced with something else, which may be a reason why Koizumi contniues his visits. China's usual response to receiving concessions is to demand more.
I can see how difficult this situation must be. Japan needs to do something about these post-war conflicts. But China's belligerance makes it seemingly impossible and even a little foolish to do so. As for the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in Japan, China truly has only itself to blame.
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