Visiting China in 1928, when a rising Japan had begun to prey on its neighbor, the Japanese poet Akiko Yosano took a surprisingly broad-minded view of anti-Japanese passion among the Chinese: "It's surely frightful from the imperialists' point of view," she wrote in her travelogue, "but for the Chinese people it must be celebrated in the name of humanity."
Writing last year in the Asahi Shimbun, as anti-Japanese rioting erupted in China, the writer Haruki Murakami had a wholly unsympathetic take on the same phenomenon. He assailed the "cheap alcohol" of nationalism that "makes you speak loudly and act rudely" and leaves you "with nothing but an awful headache the next morning."
I was recently reminded of these contrasting responses, as Chinese and Korean leaders protested high-profile Japanese visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates, among others, Japanese indicted for war crimes during Japan's early 20th-century invasions and occupations of China and Korea.