ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Cold War, the Chinese-Japanese relationship has once again emerged as central to regional (and global) security and economic vitality. China's meteoric rise as an economic superpower, North Korea's threat to the stability of the region, and the changing politics of Japan-U.S. alliance have sharpened national rivalries at the same time as regional integration has become a desired goal. This realignment of power relations elicited by-now-notorious “history wars” about Japan's alleged failure to appropriately address its aggressive wartime past, from vague governmental apologies and ambiguous history textbooks to outright denials of war crimes by some nationalist politicians. In the early 2000s, diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and Japan plummeted over prime minister Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's military dead are enshrined along with some Class-A war criminals. Koizumi's handling of war memory issues also drew unprecedented criticism across the political spectrum in Japan – and especially from the business community – as detrimental to Japan's diplomatic, political, and economic interests. A decade later, the two countries found themselves mired in a territorial dispute over five uninhabited islands in the South China Sea collectively known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese. The (temporary) arrest in September 2010 by Japanese maritime forces of a Chinese fishing vessel's captain in waters under Japanese control broke open an unresolved issue over national sovereignty concerning these islands with roots in Japanese imperialism as well as the Cold War. Historical memories of Japan's empire and war in the first half of the twentieth century combine with the very real legacies of America's Cold War empire in Asia in the second half, and they inform in ever more complicated ways the shifting power relations in East Asia in the twenty-first century's second decade.
