World View/Paul Gillespie: The senior Japanese journalist was puzzled that "the clock strikes backwards", as she put it, at a conference between European and Asian journalists in Fukuoka in southern Japan this week.
In our discussion on "New Asia and new Europe" no one had asked about Japan's economic recovery. Instead all the talk had been about its missile defence system, the Prime Minister's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, changes to its pacifist constitution, sending troops to Iraq and the kidnap of three of its citizens there. As she listened to contributors she understood better that in a "watershed year for Asia" concerns about Japan's adaptation should be so prominent.
Japan has to decide whether it is fully part of this new Asia, she said, rather than playing its post-war role as a powerful but isolated state dependent on the United States for its security and prosperity.
Among the important changes in the region mentioned by a Singapore journalist were elections in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea "and China's critical social and economic transition". The extraordinary economic boom there, along with political and social change, is much the most important development.
The figures speak for themselves. Japan's trade with China and Hong Kong rose by one-third last year. This will make China its largest trading partner, putting the US in second pace - a great psychological change. Exports to China have been the biggest stimulus for Japan's economy, creating a demand it lacks at home. Its investment in China has raced ahead.
Japan is not the only beneficiary, since smaller Asian economies are also affected, not least by competition for scarce oil and energy.
The European Union will become China's No 1 trading partner in 2005, displacing the US and Japan. Major German, French and British firms compete for investment projects as China builds a new industrial, transport and urban infrastructure.
Outsourcing industry catches the headlines, China's cheap labour costs provide an endless supply of profitable opportunity. But the emergence of a new middle class of 130 million people, prospering on privatisation of housing, opens up a huge new domestic market for consumer goods, including Irish ones.
The contrast between buoyant economic relations between Japan and China and poor political links is stark and illuminating. Chinese leaders say the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi, will not be welcome in Beijing as long as he continues to visit the Yasukuni Shrine to 2.5 million Japanese war dead, which includes the graves of 14 Class A war criminals. He says this is a private matter expressing a benign commitment to "pray for Japan's peace and development".
Chinese, Koreans and other Asians are reminded of Japan's brutal colonial and imperial occupation of their countries during the 1930s and the second World War. They cannot understand why Japan does not do more than express its regret for its "misconduct" and seek a more wholehearted reconciliation.
They are troubled by debates on revising Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which renounces war. In Japan this is seen as normalising its foreign policy, after 50 years of US tutelage. There is some impatience with continuing demands for apologies and aid after so much has already been given. But in Japan, too, there is an uneasy feeling about the country's military past, symbolised by the finding of a court in Fukuoka this week that Mr Koizumi's visits to the shrine are unconstitutional.
A senior European Commission official told us China faces six risks in this transition: SARS; the social and economic costs of privatisation; Taiwan; North Korea; the social divide; and the regional divide. It is a cocktail of change, with many sources of potential volatility.
China, as Henry Kissinger points out, is no longer a communist state but remains one-party. If communism no longer provides a unifying and legitimising ideology, a substitute must be found, and nationalism is the obvious candidate. But the trouble is that, almost by definition, it will be anti-Japanese.
This was symbolised by last month's landing by a group of young Chinese on the disputed Senkaku islands (called Diaoyu in Chinese). Anti-Japanese sentiment was stoked among the younger generation during the 1980s and 1990s.
So the coexistence of strong Sino- Japanese economic engagement with an uncertain political relationship could make for regional tension in coming years. The social and regional divides in China will grow and cannot be contained only by rising prosperity. A leading Japanese figure told us he expects China will become more open and pluralist as it develops, but that it is up to the Chinese people to decide about political democracy.
Japan must persuade China to understand that the real motivation of Mr Koizumi's visits to the shrine is to commemorate those killed in the war, not to glorify Japan's imperial past; but he acknowledged this will require much more effort on the part of both powers.
Optimists say it will be possible for a powerful Japan and a powerful China to coexist peacefully since they both have a profound interest in seeing this happen.
The huge increase in trade, investment and the flow of visitors in both directions will see to that: 10,000 people fly each way every month, 100,000 Chinese students are learning Japanese, while more Japanese are going to China than to the US on holiday.
There is a French saying that the optimists are those who don't understand the question. A French journalist asked how China can make the transition to democracy; there is much evidence that dictatorships faced with such pressures resort to foreign adventures to deflect them.
De Tocqueville and Lenin pointed out that the most dangerous time for autocratic regimes is when they permit reform. European participants drew lessons from their experience of regional integration which could be adapted to Asian circumstances. Building common institutions for regional co-operation can create security, even if Asia is recognised as much more diverse than Europe.
The Asian participants believe European interests in China have more to do with commercial gains than with sympathy for Asian development. But they also said Asians must develop stronger ties to counterbalance the US, arguably the real imperial power now. Neo-conservatives in the Bush administration fish in these waters, notably in Taiwan, where they say the "One China" policy is dead. As the Japanese journalist concluded, "the US was the shadow player" at this conference.