Hope for thaw in frosty relations

Ningbo, a port city in East China, has been selected by the public-private Cool Japan Fund as one of the four destinations for its first round of investment of roughly 60 billion yen ($547 million).

Collaborating with H2O Retailing Corp., the fund will build a large Japanese department store in Ningbo, the largest of its kind abroad. The total investment in the project is supposed to hit around 51 billion yen, with the fund and the retail company each contributing 10.5 billion yen and Chinese companies raising the remaining amount. The store is due to open in autumn 2018 with 160,000 square meters of total floor space.

Ningbo was historically important for Japan. It was one of China's ports where several Japanese diplomatic missions Imperial Japan sent to the court of the Tang Dynasty (618-907)went ashore.

The big department store will serve as a base for promoting Japanese goods and culture in China.

The other three projects will be located in Kula Lumpur in Malaysia, Delaware in the United States and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

The choice of Ningbo by the Cool Japan Fund should show clearly Japan's confidence in its relations with China, or, to be more exact, interest in exploring its neighbor's big market.

This is one of the developments that is auguring a turnaround in China-Japan relations.

On Sept 19 Japanese, Chinese and South Korean finance ministers and central bank governors put their heads together in Cairns, Australia on the eve of the Group 20 gathering. It was their first meeting in two years and five months. Their annual meeting was suspended in 2012 when Japan's relations with its two immediate neighbors deteriorated due to historical issues and territorial disputes.

They agreed that the three-way meeting "will serve as an effective platform for policy dialogue and coordination."

Still, the defense ministries of China and Japan are expected to restart their negotiations on the maritime liaison mechanism, which started in 2010 and has been suspended for two years. The mechanism is supposed to help the two nations avoid misunderstanding and misjudgment on the sea and in the sky.

"This is a very important development. Crisis management is the most important guarantee of security (for the two countries)," said Zhang Tuosheng, a researcher with the Beijing-based China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies

Overtures are also visible on the political front. Japan's ruling coalition – the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the New Komeito – and the Chinese Communist Party have agreed to reinitiate dialogue to deal with the problems in the ties between the two countries.