Reeling from the soaring death toll of the May 12 earthquake and in growing fear of a catastrophic eruption from the “quake lakes”, China has invited its old enemy, the Japanese military, on to its soil for the first time since the Second World War.

The extraordinary request for help from China’s historically detested foe will produce an image that few could have imagined possible two weeks ago. Revulsion at Japan’s wartime past — particularly the Imperial Army’s atrocities in China — continues to play an explosive role in Asian politics.

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have been improving and China has already welcomed teams of Japanese medical experts to help with the quake. Even the optimists, though, did not predict that the thaw would be so rapid as to allow in Japanese pilots.

The devastating earthquake and its aftermath have caused China to break starkly with the past in many ways: for the time being at least, Beijing has suspended its habit of secrecy and insularity around natural disasters and allowed the outside world to join in the relief efforts. It has also allowed its own domestic media unprecedented access to the disaster sites, which has in turn heightened the popular sense of a national tragedy and a unified response.

According to Japanese foreign ministry sources, its country’s military — what it refers to for constitutional reasons as its Self Defence Forces (SDF) — has been asked to provide aircraft and to help to transport additional relief materials as the Chinese Government struggles to relieve the situation on the ground in Sichuan.

Millions remain homeless and in need of shelter and other supplies. More than 150,000 people have been evacuated in the past 24 hours from the valley below the largest of the Sichuan “quake lakes” formed by landslides. Despite massive efforts to release water pressure from the natural dams that have formed in the mountains, it is slow work.

Heavy earth-moving equipment has been airlifted into the remote valley that contains the lake. Because landslides have severed all road access to the lake, Chinese troops have hefted about 16 tonnes of explosives up to the site over treacherous mountain passes.

Rising water levels and forecasts of heavy rain in the coming days have created what authorities described as a race against time to drain the pressure before the largest of the lakes, Tangjiashan, bursts and creates a second disaster for the refugees struggling to survive downstream.

Government sources in Tokyo, who told The Times that the “astonishing” request from Beijing was being evaluated, said that the invitation revealed the growing desperation in the quake-hit area. A pair of strong aftershocks on Tuesday wreaked yet more havoc on the stricken region, felling 420,000 more buildings.

The official death toll has crept higher every day. More than 68,000 are known to have been killed and hopes for the survival of the 20,000 still missing are all but extinguished. Villagers in the stricken region told The Times that the invitation to Japan’s SDF follows just weeks after a breakthrough visit to Tokyo by China’s President, Hu Jintao — a visit that appeared to re-unite the two neighbours after many years of barely contained hostility.

The acrimony hit a peak in 2005 when revulsion over visits by Junichiro Koizumi, then Japan’s Prime Minister, to a controversial war shrine spilled over on the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities. Mr Koizumi, a notoriously stubborn political maverick, persisted in honouring the war dead memorialised in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. To the dismay of China, Korea and other former victims of Japan’s imperial assault on Asia, that list of honoured dead includes 14 class-A war criminals.

The Japanese Embassy in Beijing was pelted with stones and widespread anti-Japan demonstrations came close to running out of control. As the relationship between Asia’s largest powers deteriorated fast, the politicians stopped talking and businesses on both sides of the East China Sea bemoaned the threat to Asia’s biggest trading relationship. It was only after Mr Koizumi stepped down from office in 2006 that leaders in Tokyo and Beijing were able to embark on their choreographed “ice-melting process”.

The two countries remain at odds, however, on the question of resource rights in the East China Sea, where an unspecified quantity of natural gas is thought to lie beneath the ocean floor.

The thorny issue of Japan’s treatment of history also remains unresolved: China has long resented the “whitewashing” of historical militarism in the school textbooks used in some Japanese schools.

Disaster diplomacy

December 2003

The US sent more than 80 disaster experts to Iran and about 70 tonnes of relief supplies after an earthquake. A US Air Force cargo plane, carrying medicine and food, was the first US flight to go to Iran since 1981

January 2001

Pakistan offered assistance to India after an earthquake killed about 25,000 people in Gujarat. It was followed by a summit held by the leaders of India and Pakistan in July

August 1999

Greece was the first foreign country to pledge aid and support to Turkey after the earthquake

October 2005

President Musharraf of Pakistan agreed to accept aid from American Jews and Israel after an earthquake that killed nearly 80,000 people. The New York-based American Jewish Congress-Council for World Jewry issued a statement urging Jews to send blankets, tents, medical supplies and money to Pakistan

September 1999

The Taiwanese Government announced it would accept a $100,000 donation from the Chinese Red Cross after an earthquake in southeast Taiwan. Taiwan, however, turned down official Beijing offers of material assistance

(Sources: worldtribune.com ; disasterdiplomacy.org ; Times archives)

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