NEW FRIENDS, ALWAYS RIVALS
For
the five-and-a-half years of Junichiro Koizumi's tenure, it became a cliché of Sino-Japan relations that economics were red hot, while politics were frigidly cold. Soon after Mr Koizumi took office in 2001, when the prevailing mood in Japan was that China would “hollow out” Japanese industry and deepen deflation by supplying an endless stream of cheap goods, Mr Koizumi had the sense to recognise his giant neighbour as a potential motor of the Japanese economy. He turned out to be right. The huge economic progress subsequently made during his term owed much to the restorative powers on Japanese industry of insatiable Chinese demand.
It was, then, an irony of Mr Koizumi's premiership that, just as China was riding to Japan's rescue economically, Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations should sink to their lowest point since formal ties were restored in 1972. The ostensible cause was Mr Koizumi's insistence on visiting Yasukuni shrine, a controversial Tokyo war memorial where 2.5m war dead, including a handful of designated war criminals, are honoured. Mr Koizumi insisted he was praying for peace. Beijing chose to interpret his annual pilgrimage as proof that Japan was forgetting its past and drifting towards nationalism.
Few scholars believe that Yasukuni
