Shinzo Abe; Wikimedia Commons

Shinzo Abe; Wikimedia Commons

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week,  Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe compared recent tensions between China and Japan to the rivalry between the British and German empires at the start of the 20th century.

A conservative nationalist, Abe has denied that Imperial Japan forced 250,000 foreign “comfort women” into sexual slavery, urged changes in school curricula to downplay Japanese wartime atrocities and recently visited the controversial war memorial Yasukuni shrine. Tension between China and Japan has escalated since November, when China unilaterally extended its air-defense zone over the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea .