AP Photo

ARMED conflict between Japan and China over the five tiny, uninhabited Senkaku or Diaoyu islands still seems improbable. But that does not make it impossible. This week it was revealed just how close their stand-off has come to a shoot-out. On February 5th the Japanese government claimed that six days earlier a Chinese warship had beamed “fire-control” radar at a destroyer belonging to Japan’s Maritime Self-Defence Force some 3 kilometres (2 miles) away—a step towards shooting a missile at it. “It was a unilateral, provocative act and extremely regrettable,” Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, told the Diet, or parliament, on February 6th.