It is essential that China and Japan come to terms over disputed islands in the East China Sea in order to prevent a war that would bring great destruction, says Andrey Ivanov, a scholar from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations when interviewed by the national broadcaster Voice of Russia on Nov. 28.
After the Japanese government nationalized the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands on Sep. 11, triggering a furious nationalistic response across China, Ivanov believes that it is now harder for the leaders of the two sides to make concessions to each other. While former Japanese prime ministers including Kakuei Tanaka and Takeo Fukuda recognized that there exists a dispute with China over the sovereignty of the islands when they met China's leaders in the 1970s and '80s, the current approach from Japan's government is to deny that there is any question of their sovereignty. In doing so, the administration of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has backed itself into a corner a mid a rising nationalism among the public.
Read the full story at Want China Times