- Panetta is visiting both Japan and China during an Asian trip
- The U.S. wants to avoid "provocative behavior resulting in conflict," he says
- Tensions have risen between Tokyo and Beijing over a disputed set of islands
- Anti-Japanese protests in China over the weekend turned violent at times
(CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is meeting with senior Japanese officials in Tokyo on Monday against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile dispute between Japan and China over a group of small islands in the East China Sea.
Thousands of Chinese protesters hurled bottles and eggs outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing over the weekend, expressing anger over Tokyo's announcement last week that it was acquiring several of the islands from a Japanese family to bring them under public ownership.
China declared the purchase to be "illegal" and sent six surveillance vessels to carry out patrols on Friday around the remote islands -- which Japan calls Senkaku and China calls Diaoyu -- in an effort to underscore its claim to sovereignty.
The ships briefly entered Japanese territorial waters despite warnings not to do so, the Japanese Coast Guard said. The islands, situated in the East China Sea between Okinawa and Taiwan, are under Japanese control, but China claims they have been a part of its territory "since ancient times."
The events last week have ratcheted up tensions between the two East Asian nations, where lingering resentment from past conflicts remains close to the surface.
Tensions rise over Asian islands 
Why is Japan feuding over islands? 
Issues 2012: China That was in evidence in Beijing at the weekend. Waving Chinese national flags and holding portraits of the late leader Mao Zedong, the mostly young protesters chanted "down with Japanese imperialism" and called for war as they made their way down the streets under the watchful eyes of police and guards.
Elsewhere in China, anti-Japanese rallies broke out in dozens of cities and sometimes turned violent. Messages and photos posted on Chinese social media sites showed angry mobs in numerous cities ransacking Japanese stores and restaurants as well as smashing and burning cars of Japanese make.
Japanese news media organizations have also reported incidents of assaults on Japanese citizens in China in the past few days. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman insisted Friday that the public anger was not aimed at the Japanese people, whose safety would be protected in China according to law.
The authorities rarely permit protests in China, prompting suspicion that the nationwide rallies over the weekend were government-sanctioned. In Beijing, police walking alongside the demonstrators were seen to ask spectators to join in instead of blocking the street.
By Saturday night, China's state-run media had started appealing for restraint, running commentaries that condemned violence and lectured the public on the expression of patriotism. In a sign of rising concern over the gathering of large crowds, the authorities in cities that had seen the most ferocious protests canceled entertainment and sporting events.
"Violence cannot be tolerated simply because the protests are aimed at Japan," said an editorial published Monday by the Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the ruling Communist Party.
On Monday morning, the streets leading to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing appeared to blocked off by the authorities.
En route to Japan at the weekend, Panetta acknowledged the strained ties between China and several of its neighbors over competing territorial claims.
"Countries are searching for resources; there's going to be questions raised as to who has jurisdiction over these areas," he said, according to a statement from the Pentagon. "What we don't want is any kind of provocative behavior resulting in conflict."
In Japan, he was scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba and Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto.
Panetta is then due to travel to China, where he will meet with "top military and civilian leaders including Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie," according to the Pentagon.
Animosity between China and Japan over the disputed islands runs deep.
They have come to represent what many Chinese see as unfinished business: redressing the impact of the Japanese occupation of large swathes of eastern China during the 1930s and 1940s.
China says its claim goes back hundreds of years. Japan says it saw no trace of Chinese control of the islands in an 1885 survey, so formally recognized them as Japanese sovereign territory in 1895.
Japan then sold the islands in 1932 to descendants of the original settlers. The Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 only served to cloud the issue further.
The islands were administered by the U.S. occupation force after the war. But in 1972, Washington returned them to Japan as part of its withdrawal from Okinawa.
CNN's Stan Grant in Beijing and Jethro Mullen in Hong Kong contributed to this report
17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/17/world/asia/china-japan-islands-dispute/index.html?eref=edition
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