BEIJING, Nov. 1 -- The ever closer economic relations between Japan and China is offering a counterweight to their cool political ties.

    Japanese investment in China has amounted to $31.5 billion, and is enabling China to learn the industrial skills of its neighbor, the New York Times reported.

    At a call center in Dalian, Liaoning, in northeast China, young workers speaking fluent Japanese answer customer service calls for a Japanese insurance company. And in western Japan, a new commercial Chinatown is rising in Kobe.

    At a time of rising political tensions, heightened by growing nationalism, Japan and China are more intertwined economically than they have ever been. In their breadth and intensity, the ties have begun to surpass those between the United States and Japan, whose economic relationship has often been called the most important in the world, said the New York Times.

    Tensions will probably stay there, or keep rising with Asia's transformation: a rapidly developing China, and its huge market potential. Exports to China have created jobs and lifted Japanese economy from a long recession.

    "In the last few years, things have grown black and white between us," said Toshio Hori, general manager of the Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank branch in Shanghai, China's biggest city and an increasingly vital commercial artery to Japan. "On the political and diplomatic side, things are pessimistic, but on the economic side, the relationship is growing stronger and stronger."

    Now, more than 150,000 Chinese students attend Japanese universities and language schools, and a million Chinese people work in Japanese companies.

    China's ascension has been so fast that Japan must now contemplate a true rivalry, with the Chinese economy not only outstripping Japan's in size, but perhaps matching it in sophistication before long, the newspaper said.