Allow me to bring to your attention my extensive essay, currently being printed for Asia Maior, Italy's premium academic association devoted to the study of contemporary Asia. The article is partly based on two years of extensive fieldwork in Tokyo and also addresses the role of the Japanese government and of the media with regard to current discourses on the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute. In the quite extensive essay there are important details on recent Sino-Japan-US relations also thanks to the extensive use of primary sources, especially elite interviews.
The incoming issue of Asia Maior will be out soon (and it will also be freely available online), but the editor has granted me permission to share it, as we say in Rome, "urbi et orbi"!

Giulio Pugliese, ‘Japan: Between a China Question and a China Obsession’ in Michelguglielmo Torri and Nicola Mocci eds., Asia Maior, Vol. 25, 2014, Bologna, 2015.
https://www.academia.edu/11941883/Japan_Between_a_China
_Question_and_a_China_Obsession_2015_

This multidisciplinary and critical essay introduces the nature of the ongoing Japan-China spat over the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands by emphasizing the interplay between recent Sino-Japanese history and the broader undercurrents of power politics. It analyzes the evolution of the Japanese government’s foreign and security strategy in 2014, tracing back the origins of this strategy not just to Abe’s and Yachi Shōtarō’s worldviews, but also to their past responses to and encounters with Beijing. In this spirit the article analyzes Abe’s foreign policy and major security reforms. Secondly, the article introduces an extensive and original analysis of the Japanese government’s increased international and domestic public relations efforts vis-à-vis China, partly in reaction to Beijing’s own attacks on Japan. The essay also provocatively claims that the Japanese “governmental-institutional-media complex”
deliberately facilitated an increasingly hostile tone towards China. Finally, the last section briefly assesses the significance of Japan and China’s negotiated parallel statements, which paved the way to the November 2014 Abe-Xi APEC meeting, and addresses the tenability of a Sino-Japanese “cold peace” in light of the previous insights.
All the best from Heidelberg,

Giulio
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Giulio Pugliese
Assistant Professor, Economics and Politics of East Asia University of Heidelberg, Institut für Sinologie, Akademiestr. 4-8, 69117, Heidelberg GERMANY

Personal website:
http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie/institute/sta
ff/pugliese/index.html
E-mail address: giulio.pugliese@zo.uni-heidelberg.de