LONDON - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologized on Friday for Japan's wartime atrocities and said he would meet Chinese President Hu Jintao in a

Here is a short chronology of major incidents in the two countries' rocky ties.
1895 - Japan wins Sino-Japanese War and imposes Treaty of Shimonoseki, which forces China out of Korea and cedes Taiwan to Japan.

1931 - Japan carries out a coup against the Chinese in Shenyang (Mukden) known as the "Mukden Incident." Japanese troops begin occupying northeast China, then known as Manchuria. Tokyo set up Pu Yi, the recently deposed Chinese emperor, as head of the puppet state Manchukuo in 1932.

1937 - Japan invades mainland China from its foothold in Manchuria and in December takes Nanjing. In 1948 the Tokyo war crimes tribunal finds that Japanese troops killed 155,000 people in the Nanjing massacre. China says the toll is 300,000, while Japan never gives an estimate.

1945 - Japan surrenders after two atom bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, and withdraws its troops from China.
1972 - Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka visits China in September. Tokyo and Beijing establish diplomatic relations. Japan says it understands and respects China's position that Taiwan is a renegade province.

1978 - Japan and China sign a 10-year peace and friendship treaty in August.
1985 - Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone visits Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine sparking anti-Japanese protests in China. War criminals are honored at the shrine along with Japan's war dead.
1992 - Emperor Akihito becomes the first Japanese monarch to visit China and says he "deplored" the sufferings brought upon China by Japan but stopped short of offering an apology for his country's brutal military past.
1995 - Fifty years after World War II ended, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama makes Japan's most forthright and widely recognized apology for starting a conflict that killed up to 20 million people.

1997 - Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto becomes the first post-war Japanese leader to visit northeast China. Hashimoto angered China the previous year by visiting the Yakusuni shrine.