This might have a direct effect on families traveling via Tokyo, which some do -- and perhaps more will.

It looks like despite things being rather frosty between China and Japan (which I've alluded to before) in the not-so-recent past, relations might be warming up.

In part, this is due to official efforts to make money flow, since both countries are loaded and looking to buy & sell.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is on the first visit to Japan by a Chinese leader in nearly seven years, building on a trip by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Beijing last year to salvage seriously damaged ties.

and

Wen said he expected his three-day visit to be a success.

"We must keep up the momentum toward building friendly ties that have been forged between the governments and peoples of the two countries," he said. "Japan and China are at a crossroads where we must inherit the past while opening up the future."

But in part, it's due to some unofficial gestures that remind me of nothing so much as ping-pong diplomacy. You know that story? When the proxy war between the US and China (that is, the one in Korea) was still a recent memory, and when the other proxy war between the US and China was still pretty much going on (that is, the one in Vietnam & Cambodia) there was no chance in Hades that Nixon and Mao were going to be able to sit in one room together and talk things out without one or the other being stuck in a position where he lost face. Then, an American ping-pong player at a world championship tournament in Japan got on the wrong bus -- the bus the enemy was riding. The Chinese bus. He started trying to talk to the Chinese players, they became friendly, and the next thing you knew, the Americans were being invited to play on Chinese soil. Nixon called it the week that changed the world.

Anyway, things aren't quite that tense between Japan and China (though they've been better). But still, it seems like the plucky young folks are taking the diplomatic lead -- by writing and producing a play together. Of all cities, it's being put on in both Tokyo and Nanjing, the place where as many 300,000 civilians were killed by Japanese invaders in the 1930s, and the place which famously doesn't show up in Japanese textbooks because many Japanese authorities deny anything ever happened there. That kind of thing leads to, well, lasting tensions, so it's nice to see the two cities getting along now. It took two years to get the thing put together. They couldn't agree on a script until they wrote a script about how it was impossible to write a script. It's been a big hit with Chinese audiences, too.

So, maybe by next year, there'll be a few more flights and layovers between Japanese cities and the big Chinese ports. Might make getting there and back from this side of the world a little easier, eh?