Japan and South Korea, allies of the United States since World War II, are supposed to be part of an Asia-Pacific counterbalance to China's growing power and its expansive maritime and island claims in East Asia's seas. Instead, an upwelling of nationalism as the region marked the Aug. 15 anniversary of the end a war that devastated the region, showed how fragile reconciliation is, even among nominal friends, decades after the fighting ended.
Today, it seems that ultra-nationalism among the leading local contestants in Northeast Asia — China, Japan and South Korea — is gaining strength, raising the risk of armed conflict.
The rhetoric was certainly strident as China demanded that Japan immediately and unconditionally release 14 activists who had sailed from Hong Kong and landed on the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Japan had no sooner deported the 14, when a group of Japanese nationalists landed on the Senkakus at the weekend despite an official ban, sparking anti-Japanese protests across China and adding fuel to the bitter dispute between Asia's two biggest economies over ownership of the islands — and the access to valuable fisheries and seabed oil and gas reserves that goes with them.