TOKYO - Far from a turn in the tide for long frayed Sino-Japan relations, which had been hyped up, the Covid-19 pandemic and Chinese regional assertiveness damaged the already fragile level of trust between Asia's two largest economies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to Japan, which was scheduled for last month, has been indefinitely postponed and is unlikely to happen any time soon.
Experts note that Japan's security ally, the United States, is taking an increasingly hardline stance against China. At the same time, domestically, Japan has begun to question Chinese reciprocity.
Positive ties between the two neighbours were evident in the early days of the outbreak, with Japan expressing solidarity and donating to China more than 6.3 million masks, 1 million pairs of gloves, 179,000 sets of protective gear, 78,000 pairs of goggles, 16,000 thermometers and 1.15 tons of disinfectant by Feb 7.
Japan was also the first country to be given the green light to evacuate its citizens from Wuhan, ground zero of the pandemic, and was allowed to undertake five chartered flights.
In March, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe rode on China's endorsement of Avigan - a drug developed by Japan's Fujifilm - to promote it as an effective treatment against the coronavirus even as medical experts remained sceptical.
And, wary of the diplomatic and economic fallout in shutting its borders to China, Japan was arguably late in imposing a blanket entry ban on all Chinese visitors.
While entry bans on recent visitors to Hubei and Zhejiang provinces were in place since Feb 1 and Feb 13 respectively, it was only on April 3 - six days after China's own ban on the entry of foreigners - that Japan expanded its restrictions to all of China, never mind that the country had by then recorded a sharp drop in cases.
Four days later, Mr Abe declared a state of emergency as the domestic situation worsened - a decree that remains in effect until May 31.
Individual Chinese cities have pledged donations to their sister cities in Japan but there has been no grandiose show of solidarity from Beijing despite Japan's documented struggles on its medical frontlines with a lack of equipment such as masks, ventilators and personal protective equipment.
Meanwhile, to China's chagrin, Mr Abe has publicly praised Taiwan's coronavirus response and backed its participation as an observer at the World Health Organisation.
He has also exhorted Japanese firms to shift their production lines in China to either back home or to Asean, earmarking about 240 billion yen (S$3.2 billion) to help them do so.
In doing so, he noted the fragility of the backbone of Japan's supply chain due to the over-reliance on China. This has not just crippled its key industries like auto and electronics during the pandemic, but dealt a sucker punch on the medical front.
Further, even as the pandemic rages on, there has been heightened tensions around the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.
Defence Ministry and Japan Coast Guard data show that a record 289 Chinese government ships entered waters around the islands in the first three months of the year, up 57 per cent from the previous record of 184 ships over the same period last year.
And over the same period, Japan scrambled fighter jets 152 times to intercept Chinese aircraft, or more than 25 per cent of the 675 scrambles against China last year.
To deal with the growing threat, the National Police Agency last month formed a new heavily-armed 151-man unit on Okinawa to protect the contested islands from invasions and illegal occupation.
It is also building a hyper-sonic anti-ship missile that can travel at five times the speed of sound, which it hopes to deploy by 2026.
Defence Minister Taro Kono said last month: "At a time when countries around the world are working together to combat the spread of the coronavirus, such military expansionism is impermissible all the more now than ever."
