Japan Starting to Experience a Thaw With its Neighbors?

ON THE face of it, conditions are hardly propitious for an improvement in Japan’s strained relations with its East Asian neighbours. This week over 150 Japanese lawmakers paid their respects during the spring festival at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honours not only Japan’s war dead but also convicted war criminals. South Korea and China were duly incensed.

Then, on the eve of a state visit to Japan (he goes on to South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines), Barack Obama became the first American president to assure Japan that the Senkakus, a clutch of uninhabited islands also claimed by China, fell squarely under America’s defence obligations to its treaty ally. On arrival in Tokyo on April 23rd, he met informally with Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, at a famous sushi bar before an official summit the following day.

Other barriers to better regional relations include a military radar station Japan has started building this month on Yonaguni, its westernmost island; and the court-ordered impounding of a Japanese merchant ship in a Chinese port in lieu of two Chinese vessels expropriated by Japan in the 1930s.

Yet growing diplomatic activity suggests relations may soon become more constructive than all this acrimony suggests.

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