Tokyo: The first sign of today's likely conciliation between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping was transmitted through a delegation of young and idealistic Japanese MPs at Beijing Capital Airport on August 17.

The previous year, Kiyohiko Toyama's delegation had been treated so "miserably", with so much scolding from so many low-level apparatchiks, that the possibility of securing a meeting with China's vice-president hadn't even occurred to them.

"When a Chinese Communist Party official said 'Mr Li Yuanchao will meet you and your delegation tomorrow', I was so surprised that I didn't think that Li Yuanchao was actually the Li Yuanchao," said Dr Toyama, in his office at the Diet, Japan's parliament in Tokyo.

He believes Mr Xi dispatched Mr Li from their annual leaders' retreat at Beidaihe because of Dr Toyama's leading role in the Japanese governing coalition's pacifist party, Komeito, his PhD on World War II and the personal commitment of his delegation of young MPs to mend relations with China.

Those attributes also make for a unique perspective on the nature of Japanese nationalism under Mr Abe, which Chinese leaders have framed as an attempt to resurrect wartime militarism and a danger to world peace.

"I think he's a very committed nationalist who believes that basically the course of Japan's war in the last century was just, rather than unjust,"  said Dr Toyama, who has dined with Mr Abe on half-a-dozen occasions in the past year.

He cited Mr Abe's decision to find time to meet each month with a group of "hardline nationalist thinkers" including Naoki Hyakuta, a bestselling author who this year claimed the Nanjing Massacre "never happened", and who Mr Abe appointed to the board of Japan's national broadcaster, NHK.

Dr Toyama is deeply disturbed about how it has become acceptable in Mr Abe's Japan to take extreme stances against Chinese and Koreans, as well as Japanese putting forward more tolerant views, as exemplified by regular attacks in Japan's hugely powerful weekly magazines and online forums.

As a sign of the times, Dr Toyama recently declined an offer from Routledge Press to publish his PhD thesis, Responsibility and War, on advice from a political mentor about what it might do to his career.

"What I'm trying to say as a Japanese politician is we should always be careful with ourselves," he said. "No strong leader decided to go to war. No [particular] individual in Japanese society supported that war. But nonetheless we went into war, as one - why? Because the air of society meant that there was no choice but to go to war with the world."

But when asked bluntly whether contemporary Japan under Mr Abe is capable of a return to militarism or fascism, as Chinese leaders and propaganda organs allege, he does not hesitate in reply.

"No I think it's impossible; it is impossible," he said.

Dr Toyama said Japanese civil society has transformed after six decades of a democratic and pacifist constitution, which Mr Abe has tried and failed to revise. And Mr Abe has matured hugely as a politician and no longer feels compelled to force his view of history onto a constituency that is, on the whole, unwilling to accept it.

Dr Toyama's August 18 meeting with Mr Li convinced him that Xi Jinping is serious about unconditionally meeting Mr Abe on the sidelines of the APEC summit, opening the possibility of a very different dynamic in north Asia than we've seen in the past two years.

He recounted how Mr Li pointedly ignored his minders and kept talking well past the allotted 45 minutes; dropped previous requirements for Japan to show its "sincerity" by making preliminary concessions; and thrice recited a Chinese and Japanese proverb which means "ignore small irritants".

But, as Mr Abe prepares for the most anticipated meeting of his career, Dr Toyama said no Japanese politician can afford to let down their guard.

"Of course we should be very careful about China and the Chinese Communist Party," he said. "I know that from my own limited experience we should be cautious about any sudden change of direction."