Sense of neighborliness needs to be restored

Despite former Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama's outright stance that Japan is mainly responsible for the tensions in Sino-Japanese relations and his criticism of the government's distorted views on history, territorial disputes and China's rise, Japanese right-wing politicians continually defend the Abe administration's accelerated efforts to revise the country's pacifist Constitution and other provocative moves.

Compared with the doves in Japan, the much stronger hawks, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, now firmly dominate the parliament's lower and upper houses and are leading Japan farther away from repairing its damaged ties with China.

The nationalist and populist tendency in Japan is poisoning the fragile Sino-Japanese relations. A March survey conducted by Japanese media found that a record 83.2 percent of Japanese people hold no sense of neighborliness toward China. Such a tendency can, to a large extent, be attributed to selective Japanese media reporting on China under the influence of Japan's official policy and stance toward China, which fails to paint a full picture of the country and misleads the Japanese public.