Reuters A Japan coast-guard patrol boat, top, exchanges blasts from water cannons with a Taiwan coast-guard vessel in Japan-controlled waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea

The good news is that there won’t be a new war in Asia. The bad news is that the old one never really ended. And with Japanese and foreign patrol boats firing water cannons at each other this week, it may not be long before the real shooting resumes.

“The dispute over the Senkaku Islands is a direct legacy of the Pacific War. For many people, particularly in China, that war is still going on,” says Liu Jie, professor of history and international relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University.

Liu was among a dozen historians who converged on Tokyo this week to take a new look at the 15-year conflict that ended — or seemed to — with Japan’s surrender in August 1945. The consensus is grim: nearly seven decades later, wartime adversaries share little agreement over how the war started, who was responsible or how to bury grudges that remain very much alive.

The results are plain to see in the escalating dispute over the Senkakus, a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea controlled by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan. Fishing boats and patrol vessels from China and Taiwan have entered territorial waters in recent weeks to protest Japan’s nationalization of the islands earlier this month.

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In the tensest confrontation yet, Japan coast-guard vessels on Wednesday fired water cannons at Taiwanese fishermen. Taiwan coast-guard ships fired back before withdrawing. There were no injuries, but China has vowed to continue entering Japanese-controlled waters to press its claims.

The dispute can be traced at least in part to the Pacific War. China resisted the Japanese from the early 1930s and expected the islands to be ceded to them at the end of the war. So did the Kuomintang nationalists, who had fled to Taiwan after being beaten by communist rivals. Instead, the victorious Americans kept the islands until 1972, then returned them to Tokyo, along with other islands southwest of mainland Japan. “The perception among the Chinese public is that China defeated Japan. And so they think that America should have given the Senkaku Islands back to China when the war ended,” says Liu.