In 2002, Yoriko Kawaguchi, then Japanese foreign minister, was dispatched to Moscow to discuss ways of improving her country’s relations with Russia. During that visit, she told President Vladimir Putin that Japan and Russia had the most troubled relations of any two Group of eight leading economies, and that it should not be so. She argued that a dispute over a set of Pacific islands claimed by both countries was needlessly blocking potential progress in other areas. Mr Putin agreed. This was a problem that both governments had inherited from decades-old wartime hostilities, he said, and both countries should benefit from improved economic ties.
In the years since that meeting, tensions over the islands have flared from time to time, but they have not prevented the two countries from steady improvements in their commercial relations, particularly on the Japanese import of Russian energy.
This is the approach Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should now take with China. It is clear that relations between China and Japan, the world’s second and third largest economies respectively, have more tension and less trust than any other in the entire G20. That is not good for China – but it’s much worse for Japan, a country that has not diversified its trade partnerships nearly as effectively as China, and continues to depend heavily on access to China’s consumer market for the buoyancy of its economy and the health of some of its largest companies.