TOKYO - Japan and China will set the stage for a visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during talks in Tokyo this week, but regional rivalry and friction over their wartime past lurk in the background.

Related readings:  Japan loses ground in China market Talks can resolve China-Janpan issues China vows to boost ties with Japan China catch up with Japan, S. Korea in curling China becomes largest exporter to South Korea China and Japan agree to build ties China, Japan conclude 7th strategic talks

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing arrives in Tokyo on Thursday for talks with Japanese leaders, four months after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended a fence-mending summit in Beijing and just days after the two countries helped thrash out an energy-for-arms deal aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

"They want to affirm that they are creating a strategic relationship," said Keio University's Tomoyuki Kojima, a member of a panel of Japanese and Chinese scholars trying to close gaps over the two countries' often bitter history. "They want to give an impression at home and abroad of friendly ties."

Sino-Japanese ties grew frosty under Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who made pilgrimages to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine -- seen by Beijing as a symbol of Japan's past militarism because World War Two leaders convicted as war criminals are honoured there with millions of war dead.

Wen's visit, expected to take place in April, would be the first by a top Chinese leader since then-premier Zhu Rongji in October 2000, before Koizumi came to power.

"In general, I think he (Li) wants to establish the best ways to maximise the good that comes from Wen's visit," said Liu Jiangyong, an expert on Japan at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Once known for talking tough toward China, Abe has striven since taking office in September to improve ties, partly by declining to say if he would visit Yasukuni. He visited the shrine before taking the nation's top job.

With domestic support sliding due to doubts about his leadership, Abe could use a diplomatic success before local elections in April and an upper house poll in July.

Sources of friction nonetheless abound.

Japan has signed on to a deal under which North Korea will shut its Yongbyon nuclear plant in return for energy aid. But Abe insists Tokyo will provide no financial help until a feud with Pyongyang over Japanese citizens kidnapped decades ago is settled.

The two energy-hungry countries are at odds over oil and gas fields in the area, a topic that may come up during Li's visit.

History also haunts ties, especially around the 70th anniversary of Japanese soldiers' 1937 slaughter of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in Nanjing.

China has put the Nanjing death toll at 300,000 but some Japanese conservatives deny there was any massacre at all.