For me, observing the governments of China and Japan squaring off recently is rather like watching Manchester United play Tottenham. Isn't there some way, I ask myself, that both of them could lose?
I say this as someone who has spent several years living in two countries, Taiwan and South Korea, which toil in the shadows of the East Asian giants. Along the way, I've picked up a strong dislike of the right-wing regimes in Tokyo and Beijing.
This part of the world is beset by conflicts which never quite end. The Korean war, as many know, is still technically on, as the two governments here in the peninsula have never reached an agreement beyond an armistice. The Chinese civil war still festers across the Taiwan strait. No-one is being killed in this phase of the war, but that may change in the near future.
And, most pertinently, the Second World War, at least in a psychological sense, is still being fought here in the Pacific. Japan's stubborn refusal to properly acknowledge and atone for its crimes in the last century poisons the atmosphere in East Asia, in a way that people outside of this region may not be aware.
Let me give you two examples. Last week I saw a picture on the front of a Korean newspaper showing an anti-Japanese protestor firing a flaming arrow at the ambassador's residence in Seoul. The arrow landed in the grounds of the estate and no-one was hurt. The man in question was, naturally enough, arrested. Given the photographic evidence, a conviction would have been a certainty. Yet, the police released the man without charge, explaining that, given the depth of anti-Japanese feeling at the moment, they didn't wish to pursue the matter further.
Some years ago in Taiwan, while chatting to a young woman, the conversation got round to the Japanese. "I hate them" she stated bluntly. Somewhat surprised that such a sweet person would say such a thing, I enquired as to the reason for her animosity. "The rape of Nanjing, 1937" she replied without hesitation. I found it a little disconcerting that she should base her feelings towards her neighbours on something which happened decades before either of us were born. Having recently finished Iris Chang's account of the massacre, I now see her point.
There is no excuse for firing flaming arrows, or for bluntly saying "I hate them", but the people who were occupied by the Japanese in the last century are well within their rights to feel angry over how Tokyo has addressed its dark past.
The Chinese protestors who were out on the streets recently in protest at Japanes school textbooks are right to be furious with Japan. Yet I can't fully endorse their actions out of a feeling that they are being used by the regime in Beijing. It suited the Politburo to allow the protests to go on, since it gave the people a chance to let off some steam and undermines Japan's case for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But having decided this week that detente with Tokyo is the way forward, Hu Jintao has ordered the protests to stop.
The recent demonstrations were not, alas, democracy in action. Exactly the same thing happened in 1999 when the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. A friend who was in Beijing at the time told me "The government let the protests go on for a few days, then everyone was put back in their cages."
An occasional burst of angry nationalist protest in China is good for the regime, not least because it distracts attention from problems closer to home. Having abandoned communism, Beijing's legitimacy rests on two things: economic growth and Chinese nationalism. As long as the economy advances and the regime sticks to the tenets of Chinese nationalism - bash Japan, bash Tibet, bash Taiwan - then deomcratic reform can be kicked into the long grass.
So the protests in China, while entirely justified, are counter-productive in the sense that they help, rather than hinder, the survival of a truly despicable government in Beijing.
I want the Chinese government to lose, to have to give way, so that one day the people can chant "down with the government" as they now chant "down with Japan". But I don't want Tokyo to be let off the hook either. If Japan fails to get a seat on the Security Council because of its failure to atone for past wrongs, it will have got exactly what it deserves.
But when Japan and China, the 20th century bully and the 21st century bully, square off, it is like watching elephants fight. In the end, it's the grass that suffers the most.