Yet more disputes between Japan & neighbours

Japan's controversial textbooks have annoyed South Korea by laying claim to their Dokdo Islands by calling them Takeshima. Japan's Shimane prefecture dubbed 22 February 2005, "Takeshima Day" and Seoul saw protests.

In The Economist's even-handed article, it reports that China's textbooks are harshly critical of Japan's 20th century conduct.

Both countries lay claim to the Senaku (J) / Diaoyu Islands (C), SW off the Japanese mainland.

However, despite educational and geographical disputes both countries are not shy of making money from the other. Indeed "last year, China overtook America to become Japan’s biggest trading partner. Japan has been China’s biggest trading partner in three of the past four years."

The Economist smugly recommends the following ingredients to defuse this stir-fry of East Asian tensions:

-Japan could withhold approval from school books that sanitise the awful truth about its wartime record
-It could offer more compensation to the victims of its past occupations
-They could engage with China & S Korea in serious negotiations about disputed waters
-The Chinese could agree to a joint textbook commission in which historians would be free to examine the two countries’ past
-They should give up anti-Japanese propaganda