China and Japan Are 'Brothers in Arms'

choi

The future of Asia  l  The Brothers in Arms. Economist, Sept 9, 2017.
https://www.economist.com/news/b ... uture-sino-japanese
(book review on Richard McGregor, Asia's Reckoning; China, Japan and the fate of US power in the Pacific century. Viking, 2017)

Note:
(a)
(i) in arms: "Definition of in arms —often used in the brother/sister/comrade in arms to indicate one has helped to fight an enemy especially in a war  <He and I were brothers in arms>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/in%20arms
(ii) Up in Arms, The Phrase Finder, undated
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/up-in-arms.html
("To be 'in arms' or 'at arms' was to be equipped with weapons and armour. It isn't clear why 'arms' was chosen as the name for weaponry. It may be as simple as a sword or club being seen as an extension of the arm. * * * It ['up in arms'] is merely the more active form of 'in arms', in that it indicates that a soldier wasn't just equipped for a fight, he was on his feet and ready for it")

(b) "TO TWIST the old Anglo-American saw, China and Japan are two countries separated by a partly shared (written) language and culturally much else. Yet these two nations are among the great unreconciled of the 20th century’s warring parties."
(i) Popular Misquotes - 'the Things They Never Said.' The Phrase Finder, undated
https://www.phrases.org.uk/quotes/misquotes/
("This supposed quotation doesn't appear anywhere in the copious writing of GBS [George Bernard Shaw]. A similar idea was expressed by Oscar Wilde in The Canterville Ghost, 1887 * * * : 'We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language' ")

The Canterville Ghost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterville_Ghost
(A) from the Web: "It's [The novella's] set in Canterville Chase, an old fictional manor in England that once belonged to the Canterville family. The manor is set in rural England, where these types of historic family estates typically are."
(B) In 'The Canterville Ghost,' Why Was the Mansion Called Canterville Chase?
https://www.enotes.com/homework- ... nsion-called-669904
("A chase is a hunting or game preserve. Canterville Hall or Canterville Chase is called a chase because it was once, and probably still is, a place where upper-class people would gather to hunt. * * * ")
(C) The English surname Chase meant "a huntsman * * * from Middle English chase hunt (Old French chasse, from chasser to hunt, Latin captare [the same Latin verb gave rise to captive, captivate)."
(ii) English language.Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_language
("The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.
• George Bernard Shaw, widely attributed beginning in the 1940s, eg Reader's Digest (November 1942). Not found in his published works.
• Variant: The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language")

(c) "Mr McGregor * * * was born in Sydney and has worked as a journalist (for the Australian and the Financial Times) in both Tokyo and Beijing, and he has a working knowledge of both languages [Economist has corrected from 'speaks' both languages in print]. * * * One notable feature [McGregor's narrative] is how often the Americans, from Henry Kissinger to Barack Obama, seem to find their close Japanese allies more irritating and harder to understand than their Chinese counterparts, even as a rising China is coming to be seen as America's greatest 21st-century challenger."
(d) "If there is to be war in East Asia * * * it is more likely to break out in Korea [owing to N Korea's nuclear ambition] than over the small set of rocky islets in the East China Sea that China and Japan use to niggle each other"

niggle (vt)
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/niggle