Rival chants of “Free Tibet” and “Go, China” pursued the Olympic torch through the Japanese city of Nagano yesterday as more than 3,000 police held back demonstrators along the relay route.

Five men were arrested and four were injured after pro-Tibet demonstrators clashed with Chinese students.

A team of Japanese police in tracksuits ran alongside the torch, avoiding any of the scenes that marred the London leg of the relay, when a squad of Chinese security guards fought off protesters.

A handful of Tibetan exiles joined Japanese Buddhist monks in reciting prayers at a temple before reading out the names of both Tibetan and Chinese victims of the recent violence in Tibet.

While the Japanese authorities breathed a sigh of relief after yesterday’s event, the government in South Korea placed thousands of security personnel on alert for its stage of the relay this morning.

Human rights activists in Seoul have vowed to stage a protest at China’s treatment of North Korean refugees and in support of Tibet.

The torch is now on the last international stages of the relay. It will go on to North Korea, Vietnam and Hong Kong before a tour of Chinese cities until the games open in Beijing on August 8.

The global spectacle of police and protesters has been far from the goodwill pageant that Chinese leaders envisaged for the relay.

It may have contributed to China’s decision, announced on Friday, to meet representatives of the Dalai Lama.

Beijing has received “positive responses” from around the world to its initiative, the state news agency, Xinhua, said yesterday.

“Reaching out in this way will help,” the agency quoted the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, as saying. Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Japan have all welcomed the announcement.

Chinese political analysts, however, warned that the two sides do not agree even on the boundaries of Tibet.

In a sign of divergences within the Chinese regime, two party newspapers, the People’s Daily and the Tibet Daily, yesterday coupled reports of the official announcements with scathing attacks on the Dalai Lama.

Communist party officials are conducting a harsh campaign to reeducate or punish dissident monks in Tibetan monasteries, according to a detailed report in yesterday’s South China Morning Post.

It quoted a senior official in Qinghai, a Chinese province inhabited by Tibetans, as saying the aim was tighter control over religion.

The report coincided with a call by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, for the West to stop “hectoring” China over human rights “You don’t obtain anything in China with a loud voice,” Rogge said in an interview with the Financial Times. “That is the big mistake of people in the West.”

The Olympic president said that the West had taken 200 years to evolve from the French revolution but China started only in 1949.

Most Chinese historians say it was the democratic revolution of 1911 that marked an equivalent turning point for their country.

It is orthodox Communist party teaching, however, that progress began only after “liberation” and the end of “old China” in 1949.

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