East Asia /Japan

Business
Japan keen to invest in India: JCCI

"Japan is looking at India more seriously than ever before. Its focus was China for a long time and now it is looking at a more balanced Asian partnership with India," he said.

The Indo-Japan trade recorded a high of USD 4.6 billion in 1995-96, which had declined to USD 3.7 billion in 2002-03 but grew to 6.5 billion USD in 2005-06.Hindu News

India's population is expanding rapidly and its technological pontential is larger than China.

Japan-funded primary schools and bridges inauguratednahandan

And Vietnam is a promising country in Asia.
It is good to shift the focus from unfriendly nations to friendly nation.
As for China, what Japanese government should do is to keep demanding that China become more democratic.

HONG KONG China, and some Koreans, worry about a resurgence of nationalism and a revision of Japan's pacifist Constitution under its new prime minister, Shinzo Abe. But most of the rest of Asia will welcome indications from Abe that Japan intends to slough off post-1945 inhibitions and play a more active role in regional and global affairs.

As a nuclear-armed China grows in strength and benign U.S. hegemony is slowly eroded by resource constraints and the Middle East mire, Japan can bring a better power balance to Northeast Asia.

f we're going to talk about history, however, we have to be wary of China's propaganda and the West's willingness to forget its imperialist past. The nationalist heroes of much of Asia had worked for or with imperial Japan, like Sukarno and Suharto in Indonesia, Aung San in Burma, Park Chung Hee in South Korea.

As for the "Class A" war criminals of Yasukuni, the term referred not to the magnitude of the crimes, but to "crimes against peace," a broad term aimed mainly at political figures. Actual "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" (such as the Nanjing massacre) were in other categories.

The one judge at the postwar Tokyo tribunal from a noncombatant nation, Radhabinod Pal from India, argued in his dissenting opinion that Japan was innocent. He wrote, "If Japan is judged, the Allies should also be judged equally." (The Dutch judge also voted against most of the Class A convictions.)

But Japan holds more cards than one might think. Despite the rush to develop relations with China, most Asian countries would be quietly happy to see Japan's conventional forces grow in power and reach - and would prefer Japanese investment in their factories to China's buying up resources and real estate. No central bank seriously believes that the yuan will become an international currency in the near future, supplanting the yen as Asia's major unit. And even Seoul is beginning to recognize that in future it is more likely to have problems over history with China (which claims it as its own) than with Japan.Philip Bowring

Published: October 1, 2006

The author is fair.
When the media talks about East Asia, they tend to focus only on China and Korea, but that is not all.
Japan needs the close ties to Taiwan ,Thai, Philippine, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Australia, and if Japan succeeded in laying the foundation with these countries, she can get out of the meddle with China and South Korea.
I really hope that will happen.