Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida will pay an official visit to China from Friday to Sunday at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Given the bleakness of bilateral ties in recent years, his visit will be closely watched as it is the first meeting between foreign ministers of the two countries in more than four years.

While delivering a speech on Sino-Japanese relations on Monday, Kishida mentioned his first visit to Beijing since Shinzo Abe took office as Japanese prime minister in December 2012. He said, "the only choice" for the two countries is to try to contribute to the world through friendship and cooperation, and urged both sides to expand cooperation and improve understanding and trust between their peoples.

Kishida's proposal is not new, though, because similar attempts have been made in the past to improve relations between the two neighbors. But that Beijing-Tokyo ties still worsened has a lot to do with some inescapable yet game-changing disputes over, for example, the territorial status of the Diaoyu Islands, how Japan sees its militarist past, and its increasingly clear military ambitions.