For more than a year now, Tokyo must have felt a bit like Timbuktu. Japanese officials, easily slighted, watched nervously as Chinese President Jiang Zemin grinned his way across the United States. They began to lose sleep when American President Bill Clinton marched up the Great Wall. The only visitors the Japanese capital seemed to attract were a gaggle of U.S. Treasury officials, who lectured Tokyo on the need to reinvigorate the limp Japanese economy.

Recently, however, the Japanese metropolis has become far more central. Only days after Clinton zipped through town, Jiang lands in Tokyo on Nov. 25--the first formal visit by a communist Chinese head of state. That alone may qualify the six-day trip as a success, since the summit is expected to yield few breakthrough initiatives. Still, says Yukio Okamoto, a Japanese diplomatic consultant and former Foreign Ministry official: "This is not going to be an easy visit." Hanging over Jiang's tour are familiar, unresolved tensions regarding Taiwan and Japanese brutality during World War II. Just beneath the surface are even more dangerous questions about how the security map of Asia will be drawn in the 21st century--and how tall Tokyo will again loom.

Both Jiang and Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi seem eager to deal with the past first. Like most of the rest of Asia, China has seethed for years over Japan's inability to apologize for the savagery of its wartime occupation. Last month, however, Obuchi may have presented an opening when he directly apologized--in writing--in the joint declaration issued during a summit meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. Observers expect Jiang to receive no less, even though many Japanese worry that China will continue to wield its complaint as a tool of moral blackmail. For his part Jiang sought to allay those fears in a recent interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun, when he asserted that the summit was meant not to dwell on the past, but to "create a beautiful future jointly."

Flowery words, however, will not resolve the far thornier issue of Taiwan. Jiang wants Obuchi, like Clinton during his visit last June, to state the so-called "three no's" (preferably in writing): no Taiwan independence, no two Chinas and no representation of Taiwan as a sovereign nation in international organizations. Japan's Foreign Ministry has lobbied hard against Obuchi repeating the statements even verbally. Unlike the U.S., which maintains its commitments to defend and to sell arms to the island even after Clinton's remarks, Japan wields little other leverage with Taipei. Considering that Taiwan actually imports more from Japan than does mainland China ($13 billion versus $9.7 billion in this year's first half), the sacrifice seems too great for the unsteady promise of good will from Beijing.

Yet the alternative may pose even greater dangers. "For Asia to be secure, Japan and China have to be getting along and tackling vestiges of the cold war like Taiwan and North Korea," says Stephen Leong, a Japan scholar at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Kuala Lumpur. "Otherwise the security architecture of Asia will fall to pieces."

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