WHEN Sony Pictures said that it was making Memoirs of a Geisha, it must have seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for Japan’s actresses.

A Japanese-owned Hollywood studio, with Stephen Spielberg as executive producer, was filming a bestselling American novel set in the ancient capital of Kyoto.

Auditions were held to find the best actresses to play the roles of the protagonist, Sayuri, her geisha rival and the mistress of her geisha house. Yet when the cast was announced, there was a surprise: the three starring roles were to be played by non-Japanese.

The parts went to Chinese actresses: Zhang Ziyi, star of House of Flying Daggers, Gong Li, made famous by Raise the Red Lantern, and Michelle Yeoh, the former Bond girl who is an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia.

There was no doubting their experience and box office appeal and precedents for trans-national casting can be found from Laurence Olivier’s Othello to Renee Zellweger’s Bridget Jones.

Nevertheless, the casting of Memoirs of a Geisha is a symbol of changes in the relationship between China and Japan, which has had profound effects on Asia for 110 years.

As Chinese actresses have won the key parts in Spielberg’s film, so Chinese businesses, Chinese diplomacy and Chinese military power threaten to seize the position that Japan regarded as its own — that of Asia’s first superpower.

With the world’s largest population becoming increasingly affluent and hungry for cars, mobile phones and computers, China has unmatched economic potential. If Chinese leaders achieve their ambitions, then the country will have equalled or overtaken Japan as the world’s second-richest nation by 2020.

Japan, by contrast, has a declining birth-rate, an ageing population and an economy still faltering after its collapse in the early 1990s. Furthermore, in the past four years the countries have been at loggerheads over Japanese attitudes to its prewar invasion of China.

Public sniping has focused on the annual visits by Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of the war dead, including executed war criminals, are venerated as Shinto deities.

Yet this squabble is exceeded in importance by a dispute over something more tangible — fuel. China and Japan are uncomfortably reliant for their vast energy needs on exports from the volatile Middle East; both are interested in finding oil and natural gas within their own maritime borders. The problem is determining where those borders lie in resource-rich areas.

A chain of islands 1,056 miles south of Japan and east of China and Taiwan, is known to Japan as the Senkaku and to China as the Diaoyu. The islands are insignificant, except as markers for the extremes of Japanese and Chinese territory, and the potential riches that lie around them.

A typical argument has raged over the character of Okinorijima, a rocky outcrop owned by Japan, which regards it as an island, bringing with it access to the sea around it.

China, however, insists that it is merely a “rock”. On this semantic disctinction depends the right to 163,000 miles of maritime territory.

Last year, China carried out energy exploration near the disputed islands and says that it will begin drilling this spring. Tokyo insists that the gasfields in question straddle the dividing line between Chinese and Japanese territory.

“If China removes gas from that area, then it is stealing from Japan,” a Japanese official said. “We will regard it as extremely serious.”

Just how serious things could become was suggested last November, when a Chinese submarine was spotted nosing around the disputed islands. Beijing said that it was there unintentionally.

The next month, for the first time, Japan published defence guidelines naming China as a regional power to be “watched”.

Like its actresses, China is set to play a starring role in 21st-century Asia — but whether as hero or villain, in a love story or war film, no one in Japan can tell.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge