Japan’s economy has been in the doldrums over the past two decades. Hit hard by the international financial crisis and last year’s devastating earthquake on March 11, Japan can hardly afford to be optimistic about its economic outlook. Instability and uncertainties abound in the Japanese politics as a result of ferocious political infighting and frequent change of government. The Japanese right-wing forces, represented by Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo, have been using these domestic problems to incite tensions and make trouble, and gradually gained momentum. Some Japanese politicians would very often come out to publicly deny the history of Japanese aggression, the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women and other wartime atrocities. This shows the right-wing forces have become so energetic and assertive that they are already affecting the climate and future course of Japanese politics. Japan’s neighbors and the international community have already warned that Japan is moving towards “ultra-rightism”. Rather than keeping a lid on the trouble-making right-wing forces, the Japanese authorities have chosen to appease and give a free rein to them. The Japanese authorities have even used these forces as a shield to make provocations on neighboring countries in order to shift the attention of its domestic public to somewhere else. This has strained Japan’s ties with almost all of its neighbors. At the same time, the Japanese government is quite active in trying to revise its peace constitution and the Three Non-Nuclear Principles in an attempt to get out of the bounds of the post-war order. These are highly dangerous developments that should put us on the alert.

The sinister tendency in Japan is particularly obvious in the Japanese approach to China-Japan relations. There are always some people in Japan who can hardly come to terms with the fact that China is growing stronger, and who can hardly bear to see the Chinese people becoming better off. There are always those in Japan who would go out of their way to make trouble for China and to disrupt China-Japan relations. Hence they have seized on the issue of Diaoyu Dao as an important lever to undermine China-Japan relations.