ZHUHAI, China -- The Golden Years nightclub where Coco Wang works had been closed for renovations for more than a month, so when her boss asked her to service a group of Japanese tourists in this southern Chinese city famed for its sex, seafood and golf, she didn't think twice.


"It was a job, I wasn't making any money and the pay was good," said the willowy, 21-year-old high school dropout from northeastern China, who said she made more than $400 for the three nights of work last month. "We see lots of Japanese. I had no idea what a big thing it would become."

Wang, who uses the stage name Coco to ensure that her parents don't know what she does for a living, was taken by bus to the Guangdong Regency Hotel, which consists of skyscrapers of 32 and 28 stories. There she cavorted with, she said, "about 400 other girls and about 300 Japanese businessmen" in a vast banquet hall.

After dinner, the hotel arranged for buses to take the revelers, celebrating 15 years in business for a construction company in Osaka, to the 530-room Zhuhai International Conference Center Hotel on Lover's Road, a boulevard overlooking Zhuhai Bay. There, for the better part of a weekend, Wang spent time with, "I don't know, three or four Japanese. They had a big party. On my floor, at least, they had girls in every room."

The weekend-long orgy by 268 Japanese male tourists and upwards of 500 Chinese prostitutes in Zhuhai has touched off a furor in this country, roiling the waters of China's always sensitive relations with Japan.

The incident ended on Sept. 18, the date China marks as the beginning of Japan's occupation of Manchuria in 1931. It is a day as evocative of history as Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, is in the United States. But Wang, who did not know about the day's importance until she read it in a newspaper, and other witnesses said none of the Japanese realized they were reveling on such a solemn anniversary for the Chinese.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan called the affair "extremely odious." Japan's foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, on Tuesday promised an investigation. Enraged Chinese have flooded the Internet with somewhat breathless essays drawing parallels between the cavorting businessmen and the Rape of Nanking, the 1937 slaughter and rape of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japan's Imperial Army.

Both hotels have been shut temporarily, several hotel executives have been arrested and staff members have been put into "emergency study sessions," employees said. The investigation started after a Chinese translator put an eyewitness account of the episode on a Web site and Chinese newspapers picked up the story.

A hotel attendant, wearing a red Bugs Bunny T-shirt, ran up to a traveler at the shuttered front door of Zhuhai International Conference Center Hotel on Wednesday. "We're closed," she said, standing behind a ring of traffic cones outside the 25-story blue glass structure, topped with a cupola. "We're all inside studying law."

Prostitution and sex tourism are huge businesses in China, played out almost in public. Practically every hotel, from no-star dives to five-star international chains, boasts a bevy of women offering oily massages and more to travelers.

"None of us thought anything of servicing Japanese," said Wang, who was found through help from a Chinese official with close ties to security services and police. "They and the South Koreans were some of our biggest customers at Golden Years."

An official of the construction company denied that it was a sex trip. "We went there for an award ceremony to reward our employees, as well as for a recreational company trip," he said. Another official told the Kyodo news agency: "The media reports have quite a lot of errors and they seem to be making people think badly of Japan. We were not involved in systematic prostitute-buying."

He said some employees might have seen prostitutes, "and that may have led to a misunderstanding."

Incidents involving Japanese in China invariably take on an incendiary quality, with the Chinese quick to take offense and the Japanese just as quickly arguing that they are being singled out unfairly. The root of this problem, analysts said, is a complex mix of psychology, history, myth and clashing interests; the result has been tortured and tangled relations between Beijing and Tokyo.

For centuries, China grew accustomed to Japan looking up to the Middle Kingdom. Japan got its writing system, much of its philosophy and even a main religion, Zen Buddhism, from China.


That relationship changed fundamentally in the mid-19th century, when Japan's Meiji Restoration set Japan on a course of rapid industrialization and, subsequently, a military buildup. Like other powers, Japan participated in carving up parts of China in the early 20th century, and in the 1930s began an invasion that at its height during World War II brought vast tracts of China under the sway of the Imperial Army.

Many Chinese believe that Japan's efforts to apologize for its wartime behavior are insincere. And to this day, Chinese continue to cope with the remnants of the war. Last month, one construction worker died and several others were badly burned when they unearthed a batch of mustard gas that the Japanese occupation had left behind.

In recent years, China's Communist rulers have nurtured anti-Japanese feelings among their people, according to Gilbert Rozman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He said that since the mid-1990s, Communist Party officials around then-President Jiang Zemin decided to use resentful nationalism as a unifying ideology to replace the communism that few believed in anymore. The government also has routinely played down any mention of the multibillion-dollar flood of Japanese aid and low-interest loans into China.

This treatment led to a backlash in Japan, where polling data, starting in the mid-1990s, began to show a dramatic rise in opposition to China. Chinese polling data reflect the same trend, with respondents routinely listing Japan as by far the No. 1 potential enemy of China.

China also has criticized Japan's plans to work with the United States on creating a defense system against missiles and has watched with alarm Japan's recent moves to dispatch its troops abroad.

The Japanese press has played down reports on the ruckus in Zhuhai. "The Japanese will say this is another example of how China tends to pick on them," Rozman said. "They want to bury these issues. But it's impossible."

Now this is what I'd call a cluster f**@k!