Beijing, for reasons we can only guess given the mysteries of policy-making by Communist leadership, had decided to turn off a boisterous propaganda campaign. Government-sponsored anti-Japanese agitation appeared to have got out of hand — something frightening to any authoritarian government. Japanese businessmen were considering trimming back their huge investments which have made China Tokyo’s number one trading partner. No one in Beijing could ignore such a diminution; technological transfer of Japanese investment has been a driving force in the China Boom.

The accession of Prime Minister Shinto Abe, and his gesture of making Beijing his first foreign point of contact, had given the Chinese the excuse they needed. [It was, after all, the old pattern: vassal barbarians kowtowing at the Forbidden City.] The Chinese snatched the opportunity even though Abe is generally considered, if anything, to be more conservative than his predecessor, the radical reformer Junichiro Koizumi. The Chinese had closed out Koizumi, ostensibly because of his visits to the Japanese national veterans memorial shrine where, unfortunately, war criminals are honored as well as the fallen in all Japan’s wars. But it appeared far more an effort to stem Japanese movement toward rearmament and closer relations with Washington. It had, as many recent Chinese diplomatic initiatives, bommeranged.

Yes, Wen did speak about the past crimes of the Japanese militarists and asked present leadership to continue along the path of contrition and redress. But Abe has apparently made no commitment not to visit Yasukuni Shrine. And only days before Wen’s arrival he again reiterated U.S. Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s rather straight-forward query: against whom is the accelerating Chinese military buildup targeted?

During Wen’s visit, something certainly not lost on the Chinese, a Japanese parliamentary committee voted out Abe’s proposal to amend the MacArthur “no war” constitution, something he hopes to accomplish before elections shortly for the upper house of the Diet. It would sanction pragmatic interpretations Tokyo has long made, including sending non-combatant troops in support of the American-led Coalition to Iraq and cosmetics such as renaming “Self-Defense” forces as “Defense”. Nor can the almost weekly announcements have escaped Chinese strategists’ attention indicating growing integration of Japanese and American under the bilateral mutual defense treaty — carefully renegotiated by Koizumi to include joint operations rather than its old function of simply extending the U.S. nuclear shield over Japan. Just ahead of Wen to Tokyo was Australian Prime Minister John Howard to sign an all-but military alliance. Wen chose, too, while denouncing it publicly in Chinese controlled media, not to make a deal-breaker of Tokyo’s repeated recent acknowledgement strategic and tactical planning with the U.S. includes Taiwan.

Wen repeated Chinese calls for cleaning up history. The Japanese — sometimes stumbling over such issues as whether wartime military prostitution of Chinese and Korean was voluntary or subject to forced recruitment — want to go forward on current issues. And there were some signs of success. Wen apparently let a Japanese-sponsored negotiation to jointly develop gas deposits along contested borders in the East China Sea go forward, even if he did not want it as a trophy of his visit. He did use the occasion to accept proffered Japanese aid to begin the humongous cleanup of China’s environment, perhaps a makeshift souvenir of an otherwise low-key visit. But it could be, given Japanese expertise and the growing Chinese environmental crisis, as important as past Japanese investments have been for stimulating the Mainland economy.

Japanese and Chinese scholars are already meeting to look into how history is being taught and used in each society. But if one interlocutor is a country with continuing and growing efforts to restrict Internet exchanges and continued repression of dissidents, whether protestors against flagrant grabbing of property or religious worship, how does one do that exactly?

No one — least of all the United States — has an interest in any exacerbation of conflict between these two most important countries and traditional enemies in Asia. But Abe, as any American leader, would be remiss were he not to be concerned with the continued Chinese military buildup and the impenetrability of Chinese policy processes. Therefore, the moves on the constitution are likely to go forward, apparently with the blessing of Japanese public opinion — unnerved by the behavior of China’s ally, the North Koreans with their missile launch over Japan in 1998 and their seeming determination to acquire nuclear weapons. So, too, Tokyo is likely to pursue its uncharacteristic new liberality with trade concessions for bilateral free trade agreements with Asian neighbors, in competition with Beijing. Japan’s aid program, trimmed as Tokyo undertakes massive liberalization of its domestic economy and administrative reform, has struck out in new directions — toward India, for example — substituting for its past concentration on China [and Indonesia].

So, the asymmetry of the relationship is likely to grow until there are new directions in China. Some economic determinists, principally in the West, see the growing if limited Chinese prosperity — foreign exchange reserves mounted to the phenomenal $1.8 trillion while Wen, the technocrat, was away — inevitably producing political liberalization. But tell that to veterans who remember roaring U.S.-Japan trade in 1940.