Japan should focus on East Asia

Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun recently reported that the country's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama might visit Nanjing during his trip to China to attend the "Japan Day" activities at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo in June.

If Hatoyama makes the trip, he will become the first serving Japanese prime minister to visit Nanjing after World War II. Though Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano subsequently denied the news, it is obvious that of late China-Japan relations have progressed fairly.

High-level reciprocal visits between the two countries have become frequent over the past two months. Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping, Defense Minister Liang Guanglie and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi visited Japan within 25 days of each other. During that time, Japan sent a super-large delegation of 630 people (including 143 Democratic Party of Japan's Diet members) to China. The media said that Ichiro Ozawa had brought "half of Japan's legislature" to China.