From The New York Times, via The Seattle Times:
In the eyes of Shintaro Ishihara and others here, Japan used to be too meek and mild, allowing an overbearing United States to push it around.
Ishihara was one of the authors of the best seller “The Japan That Can Say No,” a call for national spine-stiffening that framed the foreign-policy debate here in the 1990s. One of Japan’s responses was to build a thriving relationship with China, whether the United States liked it or not