WorldView/Paul Gillespie: 'Our people are greatly enraged, and it is necessary for our government to reflect this will of the people in diplomacy". So the South Korean foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, told his Japanese counterpart, Nobutaka Machimura, this week at a meeting in Islamabad.
He was complaining about Japanese primary school textbooks which gloss over Japan's brutal imperial occupation of Korea last century and say South Korea illegally occupies several islands in dispute between the two states.
Similar feelings have been expressed in China, spilling over into popular protests against Japanese goods and aggravated tension over Okinotori Shima, an ocean reef around which Japan claims territorial waters. This makes it difficult indeed for Japan to pursue the "future-oriented, friendly relations" it wants with these two neighbours.
Despite the growing economic and political interdependence between them, nationalist sentiment is on the increase in each state. It is fuelled by the failure to resolve the issues involved in Japan's previous imperial role, by growing competition for scarce energy resources and by a changing strategic balance in the region arising from China's emergence as a strong global player and the efforts of the United States to contain it.
Japan's historical record with South Korea and China is not just a psychological hangover amid otherwise normal relations. It goes deeply into the post-war settlement whereby Japan became effectively a military protectorate of the United States.
Unlike Germany in Europe, there was no sovereignty-sharing in east Asia between erstwhile enemies, which means there is far less trust between the major powers there as they adjust to new strategic realities. They lack an established framework of multilateral co-operation and badly need to build one to moderate such tensions.
After the Chinese revolution and the Korean war the US became the key guarantor against Japan's military rearmament, a role that continued through the Cold War and beyond. It has taken a decade and more for the new strategic realities to emerge. China is central to this story, as the whole world adapts to its enormous economic and political potential.
This creates a dilemma for Japan. It has been driven towards a closer relationship with the US in response to China's rise and now faces a need to rearm against China and North Korea's nuclear weapons, amending article 9 of its constitution. But without a network of trust this new military activism is suspected in China and South Korea and aggravated by Japan's failure to deal with its imperial past.
These disputes affect other aspects of Japan's foreign policy efforts to adapt to a changing international system, such as its strenuous campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. South Korea has explicitly opposed this, and so do many Chinese. Japanese supporters of the ruling LDP party react to such criticisms by a new nationalism of their own, based on the need for it to become a "normal" country.
The seemingly blithe refusal of the Japanese authorities to take account of their sensitivities certainly does enrage South Koreans, to judge from media coverage of these issues. There, too, a new nationalism has emerged in recent years, directed against the US as much as Japan, and stimulated by a desire to help North Korea and seek reconciliation with it. Political competition between the left-leaning President Roo Moo Hyun and his party with the successors of the country's military rulers stimulate such feelings.
South Korea, too, feels the need to wean itself off its strategic dependence on the US, based on confidence arising from the country's powerful economic performance and its greater role in the region.
Many commentators have fastened on China's new nationalism as a political and social glue which can be used by the ruling elite to hold the vast country together. It is a one-party state, not any longer a communist one. Despite the phenomenal economic growth (or even because of it) the country is riven with conflict - between north and south, the urbanised east and the huge agricultural western interior, the large new middle class against an urban proletariat continually swelled by migration from rural areas and between relatively rich and relatively poor provinces which compete for influence with a weakening political centre.
Chinese nationalism is projected against Japan, Taiwan and the US, notwithstanding that there are enormous and rapidly growing economic interdependencies with each of them. China is now Japan's largest trading partner, the source of massive investment, and the main destination of its tourism. Taiwan also has great investments on the mainland, and its people go there now in much greater numbers.
The anti-secession law passed at the recent Chinese National People's conference and directed against Taiwan, justifying military action if it declares independence, is an expression of these feelings. It may have rebounded, given the effects in Taiwan. A huge rally there two weeks ago gave a boost to those supporting independence, and allowed them to appear more statesmanlike.
The law has also affected China's relations with the European Union, which has been debating whether to lift the arms embargo imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. US opposition to such a move has stiffened and become more plausible as a result, since European arms sold to China could end up on one side of the Taiwan Strait facing US arms on the other.
It is a reminder that Europeans and Americans tend to respond to the emergence of China in quite different ways because of their differing experience of war and peace since 1945. Making this point in the Financial Times yesterday two Italian analysts, Marta Dassu and Roberto Menotti, say the Americans foresee an economic giant that will inevitably, and soon, translate its weight into political and military nationalism as the main power to dominate east Asia. The Europeans see a rapidly evolving society that can only thrive by integrating into a world which will make it more politically responsible.
The US and the EU need a serious dialogue on this just as much as the east Asians need to build on their now well-established co-operation over North Korea to create a multilateral framework in which their nationalisms can be contained.