Mixed Emotions Make Emperor’s Visit a Gamble : Asia: Akihito’s trip this week is meant to warm Sino-Japanese ties, but old animosities stir fears.

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko of Japan will open a new page in Asian history when they visit China this Friday “because it’s the first visit to China by a Japanese emperor during more than 2,000 years,” in the words of former law student Tong Zeng.

But Tong, 36, leader of a grass-roots movement seeking war reparations from Japan, added a caveat: “We want the emperor to take the opportunity of his visit . . . to apologize to the Chinese people. . . . And we want Japan to pay compensation to the civilian victims” of World War II.

Tong’s attitude reflects the ambivalence still surrounding a diplomatic relationship now two decades old. The Japanese imperial couple’s six-day visit will mark the 20th anniversary of postwar Sino-Japanese ties. And despite careful diplomatic preparation, mixed emotions on both sides make the journey a gamble.

On the surface, relations between East Asia’s two giants are the best they have been this century. Yet, when Japanese and Chinese discuss the future, fears still overwhelm talk of cooperation.

“The worst possible scenario is that frictions escalate, forcing both Japan and China to feel that they must build up their military power,” Saburo Okita, a former Japanese foreign minister, said at a recent symposium in Tokyo.

The emperor’s trip is specifically aimed at taming such emotions.

Many Chinese believe that Akihito should apologize for Japan’s past aggression. And many Japanese are concerned that their emperor might be insulted.

And a few, like Prof. Mineo Nakajima of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, are even worried that the stamp of approval that the visit will give the Beijing government could encourage U.S.-Japanese frictions. Already, American criticism of China contrasts sharply with Japan’s forgiving posture on China’s human rights violations, Nakajima noted.

With the results of the U.S. presidential election uncertain, it’s too soon to say what might happen to America’s China policy next year, experts in Washington say. But some share Nakajima’s worries.

“I’m concerned that U.S. policy toward China and Japan’s policy on China are beginning to diverge, and that’s not healthy for Asia,” said Michel Oksenberg, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu, who was in charge of Asia policy for President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council.

Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s government has emphasized that Akihito is “not going to China to apologize” but rather to add a “future dimension” to Tokyo-Beijing relations. The emperor himself, in a news conference, echoed that stance.

While the Beijing government has made clear that it will not press for an apology, it hasn’t stopped Tong’s group from demanding one. But police have been ordered to ensure that no protests mar the emperor’s visit. Tong said he himself has not had any trouble with authorities.

When China and Japan established diplomatic ties in 1972, Beijing formally renounced reparations. But Tong and others in his new group, the Chinese Popular Committee for Japanese Reparations, now argue that Beijing only renounced government-to-government reparations and that Chinese civilians can still seek redress.

Tong, who works at a gerontology research institute, calculates that reparations might add up to $180 billion for both suffering and material losses. His group estimates that at least 12 million Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese forces from 1931 to 1945 and that 1.2 million Chinese women were raped or forced into prostitution.

“If the emperor comes and doesn’t apologize to these victims . . . the Chinese people would feel indignant and angry,” Tong said.

However, Japanese leaders such as Koji Kakizawa, administrative vice foreign minister, are beginning to publicly express irritation with such “fussing about the past,” as Kakizawa put it.

Today, Japan and China are indeed building strong economic ties. Although still smaller than the $29-billion two-way trade between Japan and Taiwan, bilateral trade between Japan and China has expanded by 20 times--from $1.1 billion in 1972 to $22.8 billion last year. This year, it is expected to reach $28 billion. Japan’s cumulative aid loans to China have reached 1.6 trillion yen ($13.3 billion at the current exchange rate).

Yet the Japanese worry about China as a potentially aggressive future military power, on the one hand, or a nation plagued by political instability and perhaps even crumbling into internal division, on the other. The Chinese, in turn, worry that Japanese militarism will reassert itself.

“A new type of nationalism arising from a feeling of national grandeur is on the rise in Japan,” complained Xu Dan, deputy director of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations. “What we are worrying about is not the present, but the future. . . . We fear that a superpower consciousness is emerging again in Japan.”

For their part, Japanese see the potential for the same kind of consciousness emerging in Beijing as China’s economy expands.

Indeed, the two Asian neighbors, who share much of a common culture, often appear to have more trouble understanding and getting along with each other than with the United States. The trouble goes beyond memories of the past.

“Between Japan and China, there is a structured cultural gap that tends to create a vicious cycle of spiraling antagonism and disdain,” according to Takashi Sugimoto of the International Institute for Global Peace of Tokyo.

Xu, on China’s part, complained that “on some occasions Japan claims to be a member of the West, on others, a member of Asia. But on important occasions and key issues, it always sides with the West.”

Yet such prominent Japanese as Akio Tanii, president of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., insist that it is the Chinese, not the Japanese, who are most like Westerners.

“Matsushita is engaged in more than 100 cases of technical collaboration with China. We are the same Oriental people, but Chinese are very different from Japanese. Indeed, Chinese are close to Westerners,” Tanii said.

A 1988 poll conducted by the Yomiuri newspaper in Tokyo and the Social Research Organization in Beijing found 70% of Japanese and 54% of Chinese expressing an affinity for one another. But Japanese interest in China was in cultural and human exchanges, and Chinese interest in Japan was in scientific and technological exchanges.

Moreover, two-thirds of the Japanese who travel to China are 40 years old or older, while two-thirds of the Japanese who visit the United States are under 40.

“We have become rich, but we don’t know our neighbors,” said Reiji Terasawa, a Kyushu University doctor who spent a year at the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital in Beijing.

Nor do the Chinese know present-day Japan, said Sugimoto of Tokyo’s Institute for Global Peace. Because they haven’t been told that Japan is China’s No. 1 aid donor, average Chinese see Japan as a nation not only unwilling to apologize for its aggressive past but also lacking gratitude for China’s renunciation of reparations, he said.

Jameson reported from Tokyo and Holley from Beijing. Times staff writer Jim Mann in Washington also contributed to this story.