Mdvmhonpa suggests, in a comment, a reason for Chinese protests against Japan. I responded that China needs no momentous political decisions to be pissed off with Japan. For one thing, many Chinese people have never forgotten the insults of wars and invasions (see anger over the Yasukuni shrine). Second, Japanese come to China for orgies and are caught red-handed. A local rock-climbing bar turns Japanese visitors away because both China and Japan claim the Diaoyu Islands. And fourth:

Last December, Japan’s largest carmaker Toyota had to pull out two advertisements for its China-made sports utility vehicles following complaints that they were offensive.

One of the ads showed two stone lions, a popular cultural symbol, saluting and bowing to the company’s Land Cruiser Prado – an image which some Chinese said was a slight that had hurt their feelings.

Nine months later, Nippon Paint and ad agency Leo Burnett China ran into a similar controversy with an ad featuring two dragons entwined on the pillars of a Chinese pavilion. The ad depicted, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, how one of the dragons slipped down after the pillar was given a fresh coat of Nippon Paint.

International Advertising, a Chinese trade magazine, gave the ad top marks for creativity and said it illustrated the product’s quality ‘perfectly’.

But many readers and Internet users saw red, slamming the ad as an insult to the Chinese as the dragon is widely regarded as a symbol of China.

‘This is like a curse on us,’ said an angry posting on sina.com, where many readers saw the ad as another example of insensitive behaviour by a Japanese company.

China may regularly castigate The West for trying to keep them down, but never underestimate the amount of venom they store up for Japan.