CHINA:CHINESE PRESIDENT Hu Jintao arrived in Tokyo yesterday on a historic mission to bring what he called a "warm spring of friendship" to a bilateral relationship battered by rows over history, territory and trade.
Originally planned for last month, the first visit to Japan by a Chinese leader for a decade was postponed by a dispute over imported food, and comes amid widespread unease over Beijing's crackdown in Tibet.
During their five-day visit, Mr Hu and his wife, Liu Yongqing, will meet Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, lecture students at a top private university and play ping pong with Japanese prime minister Yasuo Fukuda.
Many hope that the Chinese leader will also promise a replacement for Ling Ling, Japan's oldest giant panda, who died last week.
The Sino-Japan economic partnership is one of the world's strongest, worth $236 billion (€151 billion) in goods and services last year, making China Japan's largest trading partner. But the two sides have sometimes struggled to keep diplomatic ties from unravelling over the past decade.
Relations fell to a nadir three years ago when Chinese anger over Japanese history textbooks sparked anti-Japanese riots across the country. Beijing put high-level diplomacy into deep freeze for five years during the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi, who angered China by making annual pilgrimages to the Yasukuni war shrine.
His successor, Shinzo Abe, helped repair the damage with a trip to China in 2006, followed by an "ice-thawing" visit last year by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
Mr Hu hopes to consolidate these gains with what Mr Fukuda calls a "great leap forward" in bilateral relations, but they will have to deal with several thorny issues.
In the background looms along-running dispute over gas reserves in the east China Sea, and in the foreground the Japanese public is still smarting from a scandal involving imported Chinese dumplings that poisoned dozens of people. Suspicions linger that the poisoning was deliberate
Mr Fukuda, who has been at pains to avoid criticising Beijing over Tibet, must also avoid accusations of being "soft" on China.