Even Panda Diplomacy Isn't Working HONG KONG - The overhead pictures of Taiwanese and Japanese ships circling each other and shooting off their water cannons have made the seagoing confrontations appear almost playful. Chinese ships have had similar standoffs with the Japanese Coast Guard. But at such close quarters, one wrong turn by one angry captain aboard any one of the vessels could easily result in a bumping incident, a ramming or a sinking, or even an exchange of gunfire. Out of such mishaps, wars can start. Finally, after weeks of bluster, street protests and distended-vein rhetoric, the professional diplomats seem to be stirring themselves. Senior Chinese and Japanese officials met Tuesday in Beijing, and both foreign ministers huddled at the United Nations in New York. Meanwhile, however, the failure of the governments - some might even call it official negligence - to tamp down public emotions over the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute has led to some unfortunate collateral damage. Concerts and ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the restoration of Chinese-Japanese relations have been scrapped. Tour groups are canceling their trips. Some Japanese factories are said to be cutting production. Japanese restaurants, businesses and citizens have been attacked in China. In Shanghai last week, a Chinese man holding a sign that said "Japanese devils return home" reportedly torched his Honda Civic in front of a Honda dealership. And now, after receiving a cascade of anti-China mail, a zoo in Japan is reconsidering its decision to accept two giant pandas from Beijing. The Yagiyama Zoological Park is located in Sendai, one of the cities most heavily damaged by the earthquake and tsunami last year. City and zoo officials had sought the pandas, thinking they would be a hit with traumatized children in the tsunami zone. But Michiya Ujiie, working on the panda deal from the Sendai side, said all communication with the Chinese had ceased. "Neither side has suggested suspending the exchange altogether," Mr. Ujiie told Akiko Fujita of ABC News in Tokyo. But under these circumstances, I don't expect to get a call at all. "It's precisely because they are too symbolic, we dare not take the risk," said a member of the Sendai City Assembly, quoted on The Shanghaiist blog. Emiko Okuyama, the mayor of Sendai, had initiated the request to lease the pandas, according to the Asahi Shimbun, and the deal was cemented by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan when he met with President Hu Jintao in Beiing last Christmas. Panda diplomacy, which existed long before the doctrinal invention of "soft power," has been famously instrumental in breaking the diplomatic ice between China and other nations, perhaps most notably with Beijing's agreement to send two pandas to the National Zoo in Washington in 1972. Britain, experiencing deep and immediate panda envy, appealed to Beijing for its own pandas. In 1974, Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching arrived at the London Zoo, thus closing the panda gap. Since then, China has shipped pandas - on loan or lease, not outright gifts - to zoos all over the world. The Berlin Zoo is hoping for a replacement for its recently deceased male panda Bao-Bao. China had given him to the zoo as a cub in 1980, and at age 34 Bao-Bao was said to have been the world's oldest male panda in captivity. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly pressed Chinese leaders for a new panda when she visited Beijing last month, although Der Spiegel reported that the cost might be prohibitive - "around €1 million a year for the privilege of hosting one of the gentle giants." "They have a little tactic that you Americans with your Disneylands and the Russians with their Bolshoi Ballet can hardly match," a Japanese banker in Tokyo told Henry Scott Stokes of The Times in 1980, speaking of China's use of its pandas as diplomatic pawns. Panda diplomacy is Ping-Pong diplomacy by another name, terribly obvious but low-key and shrewd. But despite their appeal as adorable diplomats, Chinese pandas have not always been welcomed. In 1958, amid anti-Communist fervor in the United States, the State Department refused the offer of a giant panda from Mao Zedong's government. No American zoo had a panda at the time, and a number of zoo directors - notably those at the Bronx Zoo and the Brookfield Zoo in suburban Chicago - were pleading with the government for a waiver of a ban on trade with Communist China. But the State Department refused to budge. The Brookfield Zoo, in 1931, had been the first American zoo to exhibit a panda, and a Chinese panda named Pandora was a huge hit at the World's Fair in New York in 1939. Then, in 1972, on his historic trip to China, President Richard Nixon scored his diplomatic triumph in getting Ling-Ling and and Hsing-Hsing for the National Zoo, where they became diplomatic superstars. Sadly, the latest of Washington's popular pandas, a week-old baby, died Sunday. In 2005, Beijing offered a pair of pandas to Taiwan, deftly painting the nationalistic government of President Chen Shui-bian into a diplomatic corner. "The pandas are a trick, just like the Trojan horse," the lawmaker Huang Shi-cho told Mark Magnier of The Los Angeles Times. Pandas are cute, but they are meant to destroy Taiwan's psychological defenses. Mr. Chen refused the pandas, but two years later, his successor, Ma Ying-jeou, reversed the decision as he moved to forge closer ties between Taiwan and the mainland. On Dec. 22, 2008, Tuan-Tuan and Yuan-Yuan arrived in Taipei after a three-hour flight from Chengdu in Sichuan Province, The Times reported, "as Taiwanese around the island watched spellbound on television." The Times's story also said: "The pandas' arrival in Taiwan - more than three years in the making - symbolizes a new spirit across the Taiwan Strait." Earlier this summer, the strident governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, initiated a mild bilateral rupture when he said a newborn panda at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo should be named "Sen-sen" or "Kaku-kaku," a reference to the Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan. China calls the guano-splattered islets the Diaoyu islands. Chinese officials were offended, then dismissive. The cub died six days after Mr. Ishihara's statements, but its body, ABC News recently reported, "remains in a freezer on zoo grounds, nearly three months later." "China maintains full ownership of the pandas it loans out," the report said, "but Tokyo officials say they have not received any word from Beijing about what to do with the frozen creature."