China and Japan have claimed sovereignty of tiny, inhabitant islands in the East China Sea for a long time. This paper attempts to analyze this territorial dispute from the conflict transformation perspective to seek a peaceful end. I believe that Nationalism plays a key role and interferes to resolve the dispute by international conflict resolution methods. To prove the influence of the nationalism on the dispute, I conducted a survey to measure individual’s nationalistic attributions and inquire attitudes toward the islands dispute of Chinese and Japanese. The survey result shows that a majority of the both Chinese and Japanese participants having a strong individual nationalistic attribution support their nation’s sovereignty over the islands. Moreover, a majority of the Chinese and Japanese having a weak individual nationalistic attribution do not support their nations’ sovereignty rather take different positions regarding to the islands dispute.
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