How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency

BEIJING — It has all the ingredients of a future tragedy, peppered with grim farce. A collapsing Japanese ambassador. A noodle soup attack. A nuclear war threat. Music concerts canceled along with tens of thousands of private vacations and major friendship celebrations. An 81-year-old national trauma revived. And underneath all that, the shopping continues. Welcome to Chinese-Japanese relations in 2012.

In China, the state-run media were so angry on Friday over the Japanese government’s purchase earlier in the week of some of the Diaoyu islands, which the two nations both claim — Japan calls them the Senkakus — that the word “purchase” appears only in quotation marks in stories, as if it didn’t happen. (It did.) Early on Friday morning, six Chinese navy surveillance vessels arrived at the newly nationalized islands, bought from a Japanese family, prompting a protest from the Japanese government.

So far so normal, perhaps, in this long running, acrimonious dispute between these love-hate neighbors over a clutch of small, craggy islands in the East China Sea (for background on the issue, see this post by my colleague Mark McDonald.)

Yet this round of fury in China may prove worse than previous ones. This week, in a startling, apparently one-time call, the state-run Beijing Evening News suggested China should use nuclear weapons in the dispute, claiming it would be “simpler.”

Zhang Jiansong/Xinhua, via Associated Press

“Just skip to the main course and drop an atomic bomb. Simpler,” the newspaper posted on its Weibo account, provoking both critical and supportive responses from readers.

Continuing the – perhaps unusual – food and war metaphor, early on Friday, a user writing in Chinese under the name izhangzhe mocked the newspaper: “Did you explode the bomb? Did it taste good?”

Other Chinese commentators pointed out that it was one thing for angry netizens to make extreme calls, but quite another for an official newspaper to do so(this link is in Chinese).

The People’s Daily on Friday carried a furiously worded article demanding that Japan “return to reason,” with the headline on its online news page blaring (in Chinese): “Is Japan prepared for the consequences of its odious acts?”

In Tokyo, the new Japanese ambassador to Beijing, Shinichi Nishimiya, appointed just two days before, collapsed on the street near his home and was taken to hospital unconscious, Japanese media reported. He has since recovered somewhat but Japan will choose a new ambassador, China News Service said.

His predecessor was recalled after a Japanese national flag was plucked off the ambassadorial car on a Beijing highway recently, apparently by Chinese nationalist hotheads.

On Thursday in Shanghai, a bowl of hot noodle soup was thrown in the face of a Japanese, the Kyodo news agency reported, in a first recorded attack on a Japanese person since the islands dispute flared after Japan purchased three islands on Tuesday from the family that owned them, for about $26 million. Photographs circulating online purport to show a burning Japanese-made car in Shanghai, apparently set on fire by its owner, with anti-Japanese banners in the background.

Relations are almost certain to worsen. Next Tuesday is the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident, the trigger for the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in northeast China, and for many Chinese the beginning of 14 years of vicious subjugation by Japan that ended only when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to a Japanese surrender in World War II.

“9.18,” as it’s known by its dates, is on people’s minds here.

Marching in Tokyo yesterday, Chinese men held a handwritten cardboard sign proclaiming: “New scores and old scores will be settled together,” in this photograph on the People’s Daily Web site.

Celebrities are getting in on the act, with the Chinese actress Li Bingbing canceling a trip to Japan, The Beijing News reported. Friendship events planned for the end of the month to mark the 40th anniversary of the resumption of Chinese-Japanese ties are falling like ninepins. A report in the Asahi Shimbun outlined many other cancellations.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post presented a dark picture of the situation, writing: “Ten Chinese generals issued a joint statement yesterday warning that the People’s Liberation Army is ‘ready to take Japan on’,” and citing an editor of a Communist Party-run magazine, the Central Party School’s Study Times, Deng Yuwen, that there was a chance of armed clashes after the party’s 18th congress, which will probably be held next month.

The government is believed to want a peaceful meeting at all costs, since it is when an heir to the party general-secretary, President Hu Jintao, will be announced.

While all this is very disquieting in this region, what does it mean to the world?

Nuclear war talk makes everyone nervous. And then there’s the importance of global trade and a weak global economy. In a new twist, China’s deputy minister of commerce, Jiang Zengwei, said on Thursday that economic and trade ties could be affected by the dispute, Reuters reported.

“China is the world’s second-biggest economy and Japan is the third-biggest,” the news agency wrote. “Any disruption in their ties could have consequences for the global economy, which has already been buffeted by the debt crisis in Europe and the lack of a cohesive recovery in the United States.”