Japan-watchers have asked since the “bubble” of the late-1980s, “What are the Japanese going to do?” Now Shinzo Abe, the bluntly nationalist prime minister, is making this clear, prompting a new question: “How will Americans and Japan’s neighbors handle what the Japanese are going to do?”

China forces the question, as it does much else at the western end of the Pacific. Its economy overtook Japan’s in 2010 and will soon overtake America’s. Its assertive moves in the seas around it, have the region sitting up and watching—as is Washington, and very closely.

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The talk now is of a resurgent Japan. Abe just announced plans to reinterpret Japan’s peace constitution to allow for military activity beyond defense of Japan’s borders. He stands fast in asserting sovereignty over islands Beijing also claims. His “Abenomics” experiment, making money so cheap corporations, consumers, and investors can scarcely avoid spending it, is intended to jolt the economy back to life after two decades in a coma. It is daring, and it is working. On Monday, Japan reported first-quarter growth at an annualized rate of 6.7 percent, the best quarterly performance since Q3 2011.

Abe’s premiership is complex, but there is a strong argument that China effectively holds the cue cards.

“Japan is clearly trying to play a regional role and revive its economy,” says David Pilling, Asia editor at the Financial Times. “But ‘resurgent Japan’ sets up the wrong idea. What you have is a resurgent China, and Japan reacting to it. China was the backdrop to Abe’s re-election two years ago. He was made in Beijing.”

Pilling has just published Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival, which, for my money, is the Japan book of his generation. In it, he identifies the deep sources of Japan’s long national angst as to its place in Asia. The book suggests Japan is just as committed as China is to achieving a new postwar settlement—and asserting itself as a Pacific power in a reshaped regional constellation.

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I have long viewed Japan and China as the Germany and France of East Asia, and until these two powers are reconciled, insecurity and anxiety will prevail across the region. Renovating the post-1945 order, much as Washington resists, is the only starting point holding any promise of success.

But this sets us up for a nice raft of worrisome potential outcomes, if Pilling’s thesis is correct (and I think it is). The best reply to this observation is simple: Maintaining stability at all costs can sometimes be detrimental. Few significant historical advances have been achieved without risk.

“We’ve had a strong China and a weak Japan, and then a strong Japan and a weak China,” Pilling observes. “But we’ve never had a strong China and a strong Japan. I’m not predicting war, but it’s not a happy situation, and I can’t see it going away soon.”

Armed conflict indeed seems far-fetched. There are too many intelligent minds in Beijing and Tokyo, and the extent of economic interdependence between the two powers can be counted an insurance policy against any kind of hot war. But a long-running smolder as China and Japan improvise their way toward peaceful resolution: Yes, it is the region’s most likely fate.

Two questions here:

• Can Japan succeed as a counterweight to the rise of China? The war record lingers in some nations. The Japanese have a long history of condescending to their neighbors. As they modernized in the late-19th century, the working thesis was called Datsu-A, Nu-O—“departing Asia, joining the West.” The Koreans, Chinese, and the rest were too backward to be bothered with.

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• How can a settlement, Franco-German style, be achieved? Can a Japanese premier and a Chinese president mend a century’s wounds, as Helmut Schmidt and Giscard d’Estaing did in 1980, making possible the E.U. we have before us? The problem: It has become unthinkable in the past year or so.

Pessimism can be overdone on both counts. In South Korea, the idea of Japan as an aggressive nation has taken on a life of its own, true. But in China, where animosities are shrillest, the culture of victimhood is cynically manipulated—turned on and off like water from a faucet.

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