That was the leading headline in a Tokyo newspaper last weekend. In a secondary position on the front page was a picture of visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin, greeting students at Waseda University in the capital. It seemed as though Japan was trying to put behind it the embarrassment of a diplomatic fiasco even before China's leader had left the country. As the headline suggests, Japan's relations with South Korea are going swimmingly these days.
China is a different story.
Despite official statements to the contrary, it is difficult to believe that Jiang's six-day visit, the first ever to Japan by a Chinese head of state, did much to advance bilateral ties. At press conferences, Jiang kept stressing that the Sino-Japanese relationship had entered a new, presumably happier, phase. But in his addresses to ordinary Japanese, he repeatedly highlighted their country's wartime legacy of blood in China. Jiang got even less on Taiwan. Tokyo simply reiterated its formal one-China policy.