Of all the relationships in the world that do not directly involve
the United States as one of the parties, the one between China and
Japan is likely to have the greatest effect upon us in the first half
of the twenty-first century. Indeed, it has already much influenced
the depth and the range of our Pacific involvements. Important
strategic decisions yet to be made will be based on assumptions about
relations between these two, but those relations are not very well
understood. If our grasp of intra-European relations has been
seriously hampered by a propensity toward provincialism, imagine what
awaits as we try to plumb the relationship between two countries that
are culturally much more distant and foreign. Forced to rely on
"Pekingology" or the competing models of "Japan, Inc.", we have
trouble enough fathoming just one of these ancient and complex
countries in isolation; divining what connects them and what they
mean to one another takes us to a level of much greater difficulty.

Many will argue in favor of analyzing the China-Japan relationship
as we would any other, employing the customary constructs of
international relations and strategic analysis, and discovering
perhaps that there is nothing very mysterious here after all. It is
always a sensible injunction to Westerners in general to hold their
fascination with "oriental stratagem" in check. We are also
well-advised to remember that China and Japan are aware of the West's
cult-like fascination with the Orient's ancient wisdom and may use it
as a way of keeping us permanently uninformed--or misinformed--about
their business. We should assume that there are those in Tokyo and
Beijing who are occasionally bemused by our invocation of the pithy
aphorisms of their ancient sages to explain what our interlocutors in
China and Japan are "really" up to.

On the other hand, there are aspects of Sino-Japanese relations that
should make the invocation of standard Western international
relations theory equally suspect. There is nothing, for example, in
our Western understanding of even so rudimentary a term as "bilateral
relations"--nothing provided by the "models" we know best from the
study of European history, like Britain-France or
France-Germany--that adequately prepares us for the mixture of
respect, disdain, emulation, and rivalry that has characterized the
relationship between China and Japan for many centuries.

In the first place, it is hard for us really to grasp China's
historic influence on Japan. We know something about it, of course:
Chinese characters that form Japan's written language; Confucianism
and Buddhism that shape Japan's political thought and religious
sensibility; a grand cosmology that connects the natural and human
worlds and places an emperor where the two intersect (though it is
only in Japan that an emperor still reigns); the theory and practice
of aesthetic and poetic that make representation in the arts mutually
recognizable and intelligible. But these, for most of us, are only
data. We are accustomed to think that only Western ideas have had,
and will have, profoundly transforming societal effects. Yet in the
centuries preceding the advent of Western intellectual influences in
East Asia, it was Chinese thought that had unchallenged transforming
power. The subsequent inroads of the West have been far from
superficial, and we need not contest Japan's fundamental article of
faith that both sets of influences work on something that is uniquely
Japan's own. But for all that, nothing short of a thousand years of
exposure could make Japan as Westernized as it has already been
Sinicized.

Thus, when Western power began to establish itself in East Asia in
the mid-nineteenth century, there was no obvious reason to anticipate
that China and Japan would pursue seemingly different strategies in
the face of a common danger. Our conventional rendering of each
country's response to the West--that Japan "modernized" with a
vengeance, whereas China dallied and resisted--emphasizes that
difference, and one can trace much of the ensuing Sino-Japanese clash
to these divergent responses. But well before Sino-Japanese rivalry
came to dominate politics in East Asia the two had sensed a common
predicament, and neither saw itself as sufficiently powerful to deal
on its own with the Western onslaught.

The Japanese, for complex reasons of their own, decided to place the
imperial institution at the center of their effort at national
revitalization: the Meiji reform. The Chinese, led by Dr. Sun
Yat-sen, opted to junk their imperial system, replacing it with a
"republic" that was Western in appearance. These contrasting
responses reflected a verdict on the utility of certain inherited
traditions, the Japanese leadership deciding to make some use of
"Confucianism", broadly understood, the Chinese elite concluding that
it had outlived its usefulness. At first, there was a mutual respect
for the passionate intensity each country brought to its own course
of action. In particular, Japan's early successes were inspiring to
Chinese revolutionaries, and Japan provided practical models for the
mainland in nearly every realm. But in the next generation, the
Japanese invoked Asian and racial solidarity in an ultimately futile
effort to unite Asia and to marshal Asian resources against the
enemies Japan had chosen for itself.

The Sino-Japanese dimension to this undertaking has receded from our
view, but it was the seminal occasion for the engagement of the
United States in Asia's affairs in the twentieth century. There is,
first of all, "the fifty-year struggle" that began in l895 with what
the Chinese like to call the first Sino-Japanese war; among other
things, it resulted in China's ceding Taiwan to Japan and in the
displacement of China's influence in Korea with the Japanese
annexation of the peninsula in 1905. There followed the
"thirteen-year war" (l931-45) that began with Japan's detachment of
Manchuria from China proper and the establishment of Manchukuo, and
ended with Japan's capitulation. It was the second phase of that war,
beginning in l937, that finally drew the United States into the
struggle. For it was China that was the principal issue between the
Americans and the Japanese. At the end of the day, the United States
could not acquiesce in China's incorporation into a Japanese empire.

Of the various theaters of World War II, the second Sino-Japanese war
can be likened only to Europe's eastern front in its intensity and
destructiveness. It was, of course, a rather one-sided ferocity.
Beyond the brutal hands-on war crimes of every description, Japan's
war in China caused enormous collateral damage, compounding the
already deep misery resulting from a century of internal decay. But
at the same time, the protracted war on the China mainland worked to
America's advantage; two million Japanese soldiers were tied down by
it, so that America's acquisition of Japan's Pacific holdings was
comparatively easily gained.

On the other hand, it is now generally understood that the war
fatally debilitated the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek.
Ironically, it was his promising initiatives in the early l930s that
had prodded the Japanese to attack when they did, before China could
become too strong. As for the ultimate inheritor of Japan's mainland
holdings in China, the People's Republic, its leaders have never been
shy in acknowledging that the Japanese gave them their chance to
seize power. China's President Jiang Zemin, speaking at a rally
commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Japan's surrender, reminded
younger comrades that before Japan's invasion the Chinese Communist
Party was hemmed in, and that it was China's war against Japan that
allowed the Communist Party to spread its influence throughout the
country and, ultimately, to build the enormous military and political
organization that made its victory possible when China's civil war
resumed.

Residues and Explanations

Japan's defeat and the extension of the Cold War into Asia abruptly
severed the enforced Sino-Japanese intimacy that invasion had
created, but there were important residues. The scale of Japanese
involvement in China had been enormous. Beyond its field armies,
Japan had deployed a vast array of administrative functionaries,
businessmen, students, and other intermediaries. It ran the
government of Manchukuo, and as an occupying power had a wide range
of relations with a collaborationist government based in Nanking that
had effective jurisdiction over at least one hundred million people.
In Manchuria, especially, the Japanese left behind a substantial
industrial and transportation infrastructure. There, and in some
other areas, Japanese was widely used as a language of instruction,
and there was a sustained and expensive effort at what would now be
called cultural imperialism. The Japanese were also a major player in
organized crime, and for a time ran what was then probably the
biggest narcotics trafficking operation in the world. Now, even more
than French life under Vichy, Chinese life under Japanese occupation
has been relegated to history's Never-Never Land, something
substantial in its impact but little remarked on. (But awkward
reminders do surface occasionally. Taiwan's fifty years under
Japanese rule ended with the island's retrocession to China in l945.
Lee Teng-hui, 73, Taiwan-born and recently elected president of
Nationalist China, is reputed to speak better Japanese than he does
Mandarin. Indeed, his occasional interviews in flawless Japanese with
Japan's media have had the effect of rekindling some sentimental
affection for Taiwan amongst the Japanese.)

It is understandable that both Chinese and Japanese would seek some
explanation of how it was that their essentially benign interactions
across the centuries, and their initial common sense of danger in the
face of Western expansion, resulted in such mutual destruction.
Intra-European wars had become routine over the centuries, and
explanations for them abounded. But the Pax Sinica had also become
routine, and there was nothing in the traditional Sino-Confucian view
of international affairs that could explain the Sino-Japanese
struggle. There were no real precedents. China had not threatened
Japan since 1281, when Khublai Khan, as emperor of China, launched a
failed invasion of Kyushu. Japan had not rebelled against traditional
Chinese hegemony in the region since Toyotomi Hideyoshi, as Japan's
dominant warlord, launched two failed invasions of Korea in 1592 and
1597.

The Chinese felt themselves well prepared for a re-evaluation. In
their new state-supported ideology, "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong
Thought", Japan's behavior could be explained by "imperialism."
Nothing personal here: The Japanese had merely done what History made
them do, given the unequal levels of socio-economic development of
the two countries. In attempting to usurp the position of the
European imperial powers in China, Japan was doing only what a
properly educated person (that is, a Marxist) would expect of it.
Similarly, capitalist America's resistance to Japanese expansion was
seen to be equally low-minded, and the previous decades of American
support for China needed to be understood in this light.

For the Japanese, the matter could not be this simple, for they too
had to rally around a new state-supported ideology, the one imposed
by the American occupation. Through their new adherence to
representative democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law, the
Japanese were now supposed to understand how they had become similar
to, say, the Americans, but remained different from, say, the
Chinese. The new postwar regime in Japan, insofar as it was
parliamentary and democratic, was thought by many to represent a
return to the "natural" course of the 1920s. Then, as Japanese
remembered, their country was part of the post-World War I trend that
saw the apparent advance of Western-style parliamentarism in places
as far apart as Central Europe and China. In Japan, of course, the
trend was interrupted by the collapse of civilian government in the
wake of the Great Depression, when a kind of militaristic,
xenophobic, and expansionist radicalism came to the fore.

For a decade and a half, modern-minded and internationally-oriented
intellectual and cultural elements had thus been silenced and
suppressed, and the Japanese welcomed the re-establishment of an
internal parliamentary order, even if American-imposed. But, as for
many of their cousins in the West, the anti-communist, anti-Soviet
stance of their new government was another matter. Many of them, too,
felt the need for a new interpretation of the relationship between
Japan and China, one that, while radically different from the
pan-Asianist outlook of the discredited Japanese militarists, somehow
made sense of the cataclysmic changes that had so rapidly come to
both countries in the preceding decades.

What had gone wrong? How was it that the Japanese had so thoroughly
misunderstood their closest and most significant neighbor? The
Japanese were, and remain, the world's most industrious, meticulous,
and methodical Sinologists, and there is more information to be had
about China in Japan than in any other country. The Japanese penchant
for bibliography, collation, filing, indexing, sorting, and
referencing had been put to use by the various parts of the Japanese
imperial enterprise in China. Now it fed interminable, dense, indeed
impenetrable debates among Japanese Sinologists about the nature of
Chinese society and the course of Chinese history. But, as one might
have anticipated, these discussions, which began by trying to
understand how Japan's centuries of study of China had yielded a
portrait of a country ripe for easy conquest, soon flowed into larger
ruminations about Japan itself.

The discussions harked back to a much older debate, begun in the
late nineteenth century, and still highly relevant today. As far back
as l885, when Japan's modernization was gathering steam, the
country's most Western-oriented and cosmopolitan intellectual,
Fukuzawa Yukichi, published a famous appeal to his countrymen to
"leave Asia." He maintained that Asia belonged to the past, and that
Japan's future lay in the closest collaboration with, and emulation
of, the advanced countries of the West. The rest of Asia, he thought,
would more or less have to fend for itself and do the best it could
in the great struggle for survival. The contrary case was also made
the same year by another commentator, Tarui Takichi, who put a
different gloss on Japan's growing material advantage over the rest
of Asia. Tarui thought Japan was obliged--fated, in fact--to
encourage its neighbors to concert their efforts against the West,
and ultimately to lead and then dominate a pan-Asian campaign to
dislodge Western influence altogether.

Europe's Means, Asia's Ends

Critics of Japanese behavior, both in China and Japan, would later
come to note the entanglement of both points of view, in that Japan
ultimately employed techniques perfected by the Western imperialists
to pursue ambitions supposedly rooted in a higher Asian sensibility.
Originally, however, the hope of the "liberals" was that China would
be inspired and edified by Japan's successes as a constitutional
monarchy that blended the best of the traditional and the modern,
thus sparing itself untoward upheaval and dislocation. The two
nations were not presumed to be rivals as such, and thus this outlook
might be deemed "pro-Chinese" in the better sense. More militant
"pan-Asiatic" elements might also have claimed to be pro-Chinese and
to have China's larger interests at heart, but they were also more
cynical and vainglorious and, in the end, too imitative of the worst
behavior of the Westerners they claimed to despise. In the event,
having promoted "Asia consciousness" and "China awareness", Japan
came to be undone by these very monsters of its own making. As one
Japanese historian ruefully summed it up, "in the end what was
produced was Asian disappointment, Western animosity, and Japanese
self-destruction." Chinese commentators return repeatedly to the same
hortatory tale: To the degree that Japan thinks of itself as
"Western", it will pursue policies that will unite its neighbors
against it. To the degree that it remains "Asian"--knowing its place,
which is to say, deferring to China--it can enjoy material
prosperity, help improve the material lot of others, and enjoy the
high regard of all.

The interplay between these themes has had much to do with the theory
and practice of Sino-Japanese relations since the end of the second
Sino-Japanese war. Even within the context of the Cold War, the two
nations continued to deal with matters that had been the substance of
their prior relationship. After all, China's return of Japan to its
former, and very "Asian", pre-Meiji dimensions was not quite
complete. Whatever else may be said of Chinese intervention in the
Korean War in l950, for example, one explanation had to do with the
reassertion of China's traditional hegemony on the peninsula, which
had been usurped by Japan. Similarly, Taiwan's de facto independence
from China and the re-establishment of Japan's commercial presence in
Southeast Asia were reminders that China's war aims had not all been
fulfilled.

The dispute about sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which
flared up this past September, reminds us that, as much as Japan and
China are at peace, the Chinese still see possibilities for a
contemporary "cold war" based on earlier hostilities. The islands are
eight bits of uninhabited rock, about 125 miles northeast of Taiwan,
and about 200 miles southwest of Okinawa, the largest island in the
Ryukyu chain (and itself intermittently a Chinese "vassal state"
until annexed by Japan in 1879). It is the relationship between these
two larger islands that, of course, actually matters. In late
imperial times, China held the eight islets within Taiwan's
jurisdiction, so that when the Japanese acquired Taiwan in 1895, they
also acquired the islets. The Japanese then came to include the
islets within Okinawa's jurisdiction, so they passed back to Japan
when Okinawa itself was passed back to Japanese administration by the
United States in 1972. The Chinese never seemed to make much of this
bit of historical sleight of hand, and even in the early 1970s, when
it was already apparent that ownership of this otherwise
inconsequential real estate could have implications for the control
of both marine and sub-seabed resources, the Chinese were willing to
set the matter aside.

Yet the issue was there, waiting to be picked up by the Chinese
whenever it suited them. Why now? Perhaps because the Chinese wished
merely to remind Japan that, despite the prospect of "enhanced
security cooperation"--a widely bruited by-product of President
Clinton's visit to Tokyo in April 1996--the new Japanese-American
declaration on security issued when Clinton was there was worth less
than it seemed. (Indeed, the United States has since declared that it
has no position on the sovereignty over the islets; the invocation of
the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in response to a Chinese attack is
therefore moot.) Or, perhaps, Beijing decided that residual dislike
of Japanese by all Chinese provided a way of enlisting Chinese
patriotism in easing its recovery of Hong Kong and, later, Taiwan.
(The Republic of China on Taiwan also asserts sovereignty over the
islets; as a claimant of the legacy of Chinese nationalism, it can
hardly afford to be outshouted by Beijing on this question. And, for
good measure, Sino-Japanese controversy has helped further solidify
China's relations with increasingly influential Chinese people around
the world.)

Strategic Design, Political Theater

Seen across a longer term, the Senkaku/Diaoyu episode should remind
us that one high priority of "rising China's" strategic policy is the
restoration of the historic balance in Chinese-Japanese
relations--scarcely an easy task. Japan is wealthy, successful,
technologically sophisticated, a potential military power of some
consequence, and a political influence in the world in its own right.
How then to assure that Japan does not acquire strategic influence
commensurate with its economic strength?

In l972, when Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations were formally
re-established, the Chinese said there were two issues that would
retain pride of place: "historical awareness", that is, Japan's past
conduct in China; and "Taiwan", meaning China's recovery of the
remaining piece of territory that had been lost to Japan. The two are
certainly related, but it is noteworthy that the first question, that
of history, has remained surprisingly effective in keeping the
Japanese psychologically intimidated and politically subordinate. It
is as if the Chinese understood better than the Japanese themselves
that, properly handled, the memory of Japan's wartime conduct could
be made to shape the relationship for decades to come, that Japanese
politics would somehow contrive to make the issue so difficult to
confront as to place substantial inhibitions on Japan's freedom of
action.

The problem of "historical awareness" has lost none of its power to
roil Japanese politics, and there is no end to its influence in
sight. It is not that the Japanese do not know how to appear
contrite. They are renowned for assuming responsibility. Corporate
executives and government ministers resign routinely when egregious
conduct is revealed. Just this past March, Japanese newspapers
printed a photograph of some pharmaceutical executives kneeling on
the floor, prostrating themselves in apology to dead victims of
aids-tainted blood their companies had purveyed. This particular
instance of overwrought sentimentality and stylized grieving happened
to fit nicely into that wonderfully Japanese obsession with the gory
details of disease. Nevertheless, the rituals are so
well-established, so customary, that it is the absence of exaggerated
displays of remorse that compels attention.

It was widely noted in Japan that Emperor Akihito's 1992 visit to
China to mark the twentieth anniversary of Chinese-Japanese
normalization was especially significant for him because his late
father had long wanted to visit China but had never done so. Still,
Hirohito, in l984, had managed to speak of "extreme regret concerning
the unfortunate past." In l990, Akihito's phrase was "a feeling of
great sorrow." When he got to China in l992, he said he felt "deep
sorrow. . . . I deeply reflect that we should never again go to war."
It had taken twenty years to get to that particular point, for the
Japanese had indeed committed themselves to "deep self-reflection" in
the joint declaration of l972. Now, Akihito could say that he had
reflected on the matter and was able to report on the results of his
own introspection. Of course, these are all carefully wrought terms
of art, hard to render into other languages, and perhaps chosen for
precisely that reason. But for all the attention to rhetorical
detail, high-ranking Japanese officials will, every now and then,
engage in what we might call "Rape of Nanking denial", or reflect
publicly on the deeper purity of Japan's motives in the Greater East
Asian War. They will then be compelled to resign and recant.

It is easy to make too much of this kind of political theater, even
though it has been running for fifty years now. But what it does
reveal is that there is little basis for the reassertion in Japan of
a "great power" consciousness, especially the kind that is supposed
to make it a genuine rival of China for strategic hegemony in Asia.
There is surely no principle of "Asia consciousness" that could serve
as a basis for such a dramatic turn in Japan's behavior, and the idea
that Japan might come to invoke a "Western" principle for this
purpose is even more farfetched. The notion that Western standards of
both international and domestic practice will somehow be asserted by
Asian states against a growth in Chinese power, and that Japan will
be the leader of such a coalition of principle and interest--or will
even cynically exploit such concerns to its own advantage--is, for
one thing, too hard to reconcile with Japan's conspicuous lack of
interest in performing such a role.

What Shape the Triangle?

Japan is supposedly the great test case for the applicability of
Western values and practices in Asia, but so far the Japanese are not
satisfying the highexpectations that some Westerners have in this
regard. Even rhetorically, the Japanese are not involved in the great
contemporary debate about Asian and Western values, and despite the
fact that they are regularly congratulated for the growing
"normalization" (that is, Westernization) of their politics, they
show no inclination to become so involved.

In this one respect, there has been no Japanese prime minister more
cosmopolitan than Hosokawa Morihiro, distinguished by his descent
from one of the country's great modern-minded nobles and by his
distance from the corrupt practices and factions of the ruling party.
In advance of what turned out to be his eight-month tenure during
l993-94, he was supposed to represent the best in liberal,
internationally-minded Japanese politics. Yet even he was not
prepared to make his nation's case when a conspicuous opportunity
arose. In the spring of l994, at a high point of international
attention to China's human rights practices and their effect on
Sino-American relations, Hosokawa was in Beijing, meeting with the
same Chinese officials who had recently finished giving Secretary of
State Warren Christopher a very hard time. Hosokawa talked about
human rights as universal principles, but also expressed the
view--surely an ironic one, coming from a Japanese--that democracy
could not be imposed by one country on another. True, it is only fair
to concede that few really believe that the Japanese model that is up
for emulation in Asia is the political one--the freely elected
parliamentary democracy. More compelling, supposedly, is the economic
one. But that, too, looks more dubious as the Japanese economy, at
least by its previous high standards, seems less overpowering, and as
capitalism, which in the Orient was once confined to Japan alone,
establishes vigorous roots in other Asian countries.

In practical terms, both the security and commercial aspects of
Japan's international relations are changing. Russo-Soviet power once
dominated the high politics of national security, and trade with
North America still dominates day-to-day politics, economics, and
commerce. But, inexorably, Japanese attention is shifting to China in
both cases. The security aspect has become prominent, especially
since the widely publicized bellicosity of the Chinese in the Taiwan
Straits early in l996. But tectonic shifts in the world economy are
also being measured, and they indicate that Japanese trade and
investment are being drawn away from the West and channeled toward
Asia, especially China. Sino-Japanese trade is expected to grow
markedly over the next twenty years or so, fundamentally transforming
a host of previously well-established relationships. Talk of
Sino-Japanese "economic convergence" abounds because the two nations
are now on a course to create the largest economic agglomeration in
the world. Moreover, there are others--Taiwan and South Korea most
notably--whose trade and investment are also being increasingly drawn
into it. Taken together, all this will bring to fruition the grand
vision of Sino-Japanese cooperation articulated in Japan decades
ago--except that it is China that will dominate the second coming of
the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

If any of this is even remotely accurate, then the dilemmas that the
United States currently faces in its conflicted relations with China
will appear as nothing when compared to what Japan will experience.
This is but one rendering of "greater China"; somewhat different
versions already inspire dread in many of the world's chanceries.
Given the history we have recounted, any variation of it in China
will have a profound influence on how the Japanese evaluate their
"China policy." For the past twenty years have turned out to be the
easiest and most straightforward in that history. Japan and China
were both members of a worldwide coalition directed against the
Soviet Union. Both were free to indulge in the visceral animosity
they had developed for the Russians, an animosity rooted not only in
old-fashioned national rivalries but also--and let us not be afraid
to say it--in race. Indeed, race was long assumed to be a basic fault
line in the relations between West and East in general, though today
we seem to hear little about it. The Chinese, for their part,
obviously submerged their consideration of it into their anti-Russian
accommodation with the Americans. Neither did the Chinese urge
Japanese to object to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, once all three
countries were lined up on the same side. And yet. . . .

In the meantime, we would be well-advised to reflect on how the more
mundane facts now before us ought to guide our future hopes. In
particular, we should hope and seek to ensure that Japan will play an
increasingly larger role in a U.S.-designed effort to balance China's
growing power. There are some implicit assumptions here: that the
U.S.-Japan Security Treaty's anti-Soviet purpose can somehow be
converted into a new anti-Chinese one; that Japan has untapped
resources for regional and even global leadership that may be
activated; that despite the indications of public anxiety and the
instances of institutional incapacity, there is a stable political
consensus inside Japan, a consensus tough enough to allow a hardening
of Sino-Japanese relations; that the Chinese cannot, in the end,
fundamentally alter the nature and content of the Japanese-American
connection, even if they were determined to do so and worked hard at
it; that the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese is
more amenable to manipulation by us, to our advantage, than it is by
either or both of them to be used against us.

Interestingly enough, it is difficult to find many Japanese who will say that they believe any of these assumptions to be valid. And if they are made skittish by the history of the last century and a half - especially by their own failure to come to grips with their great neighbor, which is in fact the origin of the rest of their problems - we should not be surprised. But beyond this, we also overlook (because we seem already to have forgotten) that an effort directed against China even remotely analogous to the one we led against the Soviet Union would be long, difficult, expensive, and taxing. We learned during the Cold War that even our closest and most compatible friends and allies would show the wobbling effects of psychological and political pressures directed against them by the common enemy. Yet such pressures are negligible compared to what the Chinese would be able to bring to bear against the Japanese, were it to emerge that Tokyo was even thinking about becoming our key and necessary partner in some anti-Beijing arrangement.

But is there sufficient reason to believe that things will even get to that point? Past history, contemporary politics, and economic projections all suggest that the revival of a strategically meaningful Sino-Japanese competition is a chimera. Like some of the intra-European hostilities that have dissolved into history, this great intra-Asian one will go the same way in due course. It will have its ups and downs, to be sure, yet it now seems that Japan's efflorescence as the driving force in the relationship must be judged a brief one. When it offered itself to the rest of Asia - and to China especially - as the embodiment of a certain imperial idea, it turned out that its doctrine was too weak, its culture too unfathomable, and its resources too limited to generate the requisite staying power. When, later, it offered itself, even to China, as an example of the operations of capitalism in an Asian setting, the Japanese version of capitalism, with its emphasis on gigantism and conglomeration, began to look less impressive as other variations - more chaotic and less aesthetically pleasing, perhaps - began to thrive. And not surprisingly - given its origin in defeat and shame - the Japanese seem not to believe strongly enough in their Western-style system for it to provide a philosophical basis for renewing a sustained strategic rivalry with China.