Japan’s rightward shift puts it on a collision course with China

South China Morning Post · Mar 1, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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I underestimated Japan’s determination to ruffle China’s feathers. In a November 2023 column, I argued that the apparently cordial meeting between President Xi Jinping and then US president Joe Biden in the US unsettled Japan, which wanted to attain its goal of becoming a “normal country” again.In a column last December, I said Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s hardened position against China – exemplified by her November 7 speech saying China’s forceful takeover of Taiwan could pose an existential threat to Japan and suggesting her country might have to intervene militarily together with the US – was a small part of the great power politics between Washington and Beijing.I still believe that. However, I didn’t expect that Takaichi, a relative unknown in Japanese politics until she won the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership race last year and became Japan’s prime minister, could have mustered such popular support so quickly that she won the hastily called House of Representatives election on February 8 by a landslide.That election victory handed Takaichi and the LDP a parliamentary majority of more than two-thirds. This was the first time since World War II that one party managed to win more than two-thirds of the lower house on its own.The geopolitical connotation of these events could not be clearer. Japan refuses to accept Chinese dominance over East Asia – let alone its rise to global prominence – without engaging in at least one test confrontation with Beijing.One can see in these developments how US global retrenchment under Trump is taking shape in East Asia. As laid out in the Trump administration’s new National Defence Strategy, Washington is reconfiguring its geopolitical rivalry with China by letting its allies take up more of the burden. In short, the US appears to be returning to the approach to world affairs it pursued between the two world wars.