East Asia is at odds over the Diaoyu Islands, or the Senkaku Islands, also known as the Tiaoyutai Islands, all of which just look like a handful of blasted concrete dropped in the East China Sea but for the fact that the islands sit on great stores of oil reserves. In early 2013 the fight flared up again, leading Ian Johnson to write in the New York Review of Books that China and Japan are “locked in their most sustained and bitter dispute since the [1895] war, one that doesn’t have an easy way out for either side.” But the situation was tense as far back as 2005. A Radio Magnetic audio postcard from those tumultuous spring streets of Shanghai.