KEY POINTS:
China's premier Wen Jiabao said recently he hoped that his planned official visit to Japan next month would be an "ice-melting" occasion. Mr Wen's trip, expected to start on April 11 and last three days, will be the first state visit to Japan by a top Chinese leader in nearly a decade.
The gap is a symptom of the gulf of mutual suspicion that developed in recent years between the two leading Northeast Asian powers. In the past, they have never been strong at the same time. Now they are, and the rest of Asia worries about the consequences if China and Japan cannot put relations on a steadier footing.
The onus is on Tokyo. Unlike Germany, Japan has not fully accepted responsibility for its often barbarous behaviour towards its Asian neighbours before and during World War II. China, Korea and some Southeast Asian countries suffered particularly badly from Japanese military occupation.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to signal a new approach to China when he made it his first place to visit in October after taking over from Junicho Koizumi, whose repeated visits to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours convicted war criminals as well as other Japanese war dead, infuriated China and South Korea.
Mr Abe has not visited the shrine since he became prime minister. If he does so, relations with Beijing will plummet again.
His recent comment that there was no proof Japan's government or army had forced women of occupied lands during the war to serve Japanese soldiers in brothels was greeted with stony silence in Beijing. Mr Abe has since tried to defuse the tension.
He noted that a 1993 apology from Japan to the tens of thousands of so-called "comfort women" was still in place. And he expressed sympathy for their suffering.
But South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported this week that Mr Wen's scheduled visit to Japan had been shortened to three days from five, in response to Mr Abe's original comments.
Japan's political leaders, dogged by ties to an influential core of rightwing nationalists in the main ruling party, find it difficult to pursue consistent rapprochement with Beijing, even though China is Japan's biggest export market and home to a huge amount of Japanese manufacturing investment.
Failure to do so is alienating Japan from East Asia and allowing Beijing to outflank Tokyo in regional relations.
The Abe Government's plans to win Asian acceptance of Japan as a "normal" nation with a powerful military in the service of peace will be stillborn while Japanese leaders show by their words and actions that they have not learned the lessons of the country's imperial history.
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was in Tokyo this week. In an interview with Japanese journalists before the visit began, he welcomed the early improvement in Japan's relations with China but cautioned that unless Japan closed the war chapter it would continue to sour relations with Asian neighbours for a long time.
On the other hand, moving on would allow Japan to "become a normal country and I think that will enable Japan to take its rightful place in Asia".
This is anathema to the right in Japan, which sees China as a looming military threat that should not be appeased.
Indeed, foreign minister Taro Aso has been pushing for a fourth pillar to be added to Japanese diplomatic policy. He describes the three old pillars as the Japan-US alliance, international co-operation, and taking neighbouring Asian nations seriously (whatever that means).
Mr Aso says that the new pillar should involve creating an arc of freedom and prosperity linking established and emerging democracies in Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas.
There seems little room for Communist-ruled China in this framework, which places Japan firmly in the camp of advanced democracies.
But Australia and New Zealand are specifically included in Mr Aso's plan. In signing a bilateral security agreement this month, Mr Abe and Australia's Prime Minister John Howard denied it was meant to counter the rise of China. But it will certainly be seen that way in Beijing.
Meanwhile, China's president Hu Jintao is in Russia this week to reinforce the strategic partnership between the two former Cold War adversaries. Although long planned, his visit to Moscow will show that China has checkmate options of its own.
* Michael Richardson is a writer and a security specialist at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.
