JAPAN: Japan's relationship with China was "troubled to say the least", a senior Japanese policy specialist and former special adviser to the Tokyo government said in Dublin at the weekend.
Yukio Okamoto pointed out that there had been no formal visit bringing together Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese president Jiang Zemin or his successor, Hu Jintao, since October 2002.
The indoctrination of Chinese schoolchildren with anti-Japanese sentiment to boost the standing of the Chinese Communist Party and its wartime role had led to anti-Japanese demonstrations.
These were initially fostered by the authorities but eventually got out of control. "The inevitable result was that young [ Chinese] people have come to hate Japan," he said.
But the Chinese boom had helped the Japanese economy with a boost from exports to China. Economic activity was also enhanced by a decision of the Koizumi government to provide public money to enable Japanese banks to write off loans to businesses unable to pay them back. "The banks are now paying back those loans to the government because the economy is rising."
On China's political future, Mr Okamoto said many members of the current leadership were engineers whose priority was economic development through technological progress. But current Politburo members were all due to retire by 2012 and their successors would be drawn from a group mainly composed of liberal arts graduates educated in Europe or the USA.
China was ruled by a one-party dictatorship with a version of socialist ideology telling people: "You can have economic freedom but not political freedom."
This was a "theoretically untenable situation, unsustainable". The Chinese leadership was "groping for the answer" but it was not an easy task as long as they were not prepared to give up their monopoly of power.
Praising Ireland's economic progress, Mr Okamoto said, "It's a marvel: a country with four million people living in such prosperity." He was also struck by the high proportion of young people in Ireland - "You have a lot of young people whereas Japan is an ageing society."
He has a personal link - in his high-school days in the coastal city of Fujisawa, an Irish Jesuit, the late Fr James McGrath, was a teacher who also became a friend. The Cork priest "taught me many things, not only English, but he really inspired me to work for the international community".
Japan was being overtaken in the sphere of mass production by China and South Korea and was finding it increasingly difficult to compete with them. Japan should instead concentrate on making high-quality products in small quantities, using "a high level of human skill and artisanship".
Mr Okamoto said some senior people in the Japanese government were saying privately that the oil price rise was good for the world economy because it would accelerate moves to develop alternative energy sources. Already Japanese corporations were examining hydrogen and ethanol.
"The Japanese economy has come out of the long tunnel," he said. But there would be a new emphasis on quality of life rather than economic growth. There should also be much closer links between Japan and Ireland: "There's a lot of room for a complementary relationship."
In global terms, the biggest challenge was to ensure the emerging economic giants, China and India, with their combined population of 2.5 billion, became part of an orderly distribution of resources. In this process, Europe could have a very important role. "We want to see more European presence in Asia."