Sanae Takaichi Just Dragged Japan Into the Taiwan Fight : Whether Voters Realise It or Not

Telegraph Online opinion and commentary

Sanae Takaichi did not invent Japanese nationalism, but she has given it a clear and unapologetic voice. Within weeks of entering office as the country’s first woman prime minister, she tied Japan’s security directly to any Chinese move on Taiwan and signalled that the defence budget will rise to levels that were unthinkable even ten years ago. Beijing has taken her remarks to the United Nations and is shouting about a return of Japanese militarism. Tokyo insists nothing fundamental has changed.

The truth sits in the uncomfortable middle. Japan is responding to a real security shift in East Asia, but it is doing so under a leader whose political record is built on softening the story of the last war and hardening attitudes toward migrants in the present. That is what turns a necessary security debate into something more corrosive: a project to rewrite history, redraw the boundaries of solidarity, and decide which lives count fully inside the Japanese story.

Why Japan’s turn matters now

Japan has lived for decades under the protection of the United States security umbrella and the legal fiction of a pacifist constitution. Successive governments stretched that settlement through peacekeeping missions, missile defence cooperation and quiet expansion of the Self Defense Forces, but always with a layer of ambiguity. Even when former prime minister Shinzo Abe said in public that a Taiwan contingency would be a Japanese emergency, he did so as a statesman out of office rather than a sitting leader at the dispatch box.

Takaichi removed much of that ambiguity. In Diet questioning she described several Taiwan scenarios as threats to Japan’s survival under the 2015 security legislation, language that in practice opens the door to collective self defence with the United States. Chinese diplomats describe this as crossing a red line and have used the fallout to reopen every grievance from the second world war treaties to post war apologies. Japanese officials reply that they are merely stating the obvious: missiles already fly over Japanese territory, Chinese ships and aircraft already shadow Japanese islands, and the idea that any big war in the Taiwan Strait would somehow bypass Japan is a fantasy.

It is difficult to argue that Japan should simply ignore the military build up around it. China’s navy is larger, its missiles are longer ranged, and its coastguard and militia boats probe disputed waters almost daily. North Korea continues to fire test missiles across Japanese airspace, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already been used in Tokyo as a stock example of what happens when a revisionist power tests a complacent neighbour. A more serious Japanese defence posture was always coming.

The problem is not that Takaichi talks about war and deterrence. It is that her politics connect these questions to a broader narrative in which Japan’s past aggression is minimised, its present obligations to outsiders are narrowly drawn, and its future welfare state is offered first to insiders, then only selectively to everyone else.

The prime minister who wants to tidy up the last war

On paper Takaichi looks like a symbol of change. She is a woman in charge of a conservative party that has governed Japan almost continuously since the nineteen fifties. She talks about bold public investment in technology, higher defence spending, and energy security. She quotes Margaret Thatcher. She is portrayed by sympathetic media as a kind of iron reformer who can finally push through the decisions that previous cabinets only circled.

Look more closely at her record and a different pattern emerges. Takaichi is a long standing member of Nippon Kaigi, the network of politicians and activists that has driven Japan’s internal history wars for years. She has paid repeated visits and offerings to Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead including convicted class A war criminals, even when she held senior ministerial posts. She has publicly criticised the Murayama and Kono statements that acknowledged and apologised for aggression and for the system of military sexual slavery often described as the comfort women system.

In earlier media appearances she has said that the war from the Manchurian incident onwards was a war for security, objected to textbook references to forced labour and high casualty figures in Nanjing, and attacked what she calls self deprecating history. For neighbours whose national memory is built around the experience of Japanese occupation and atrocity, these are not neutral academic disagreements. They are signals that Tokyo is edging away from the limited contrition that underpinned post war reconciliation.

From a strictly legal point of view, Japan’s formal apologies and treaties remain in place. The Self Defense Forces are still constrained by domestic law, and there is no serious constituency for territorial revision in mainland East Asia. But politics is about perception. By normalising visits to Yasukuni and signalling fatigue with apology language, Takaichi and her allies have helped weaken the moral high ground that post war Japan once claimed when it spoke about peace, restraint and international law.

That moral softening has consequences. It allows Chinese diplomats to frame any Japanese statement on Taiwan as part of a longer pattern of unreformed militarism, which they then use to justify their own military build up. It also complicates Japan’s case with audiences in the global south who see two rival powers arguing over whose version of history should dominate the region, rather than a clear contrast between a status quo state and a revisionist one.

Immigration, welfare and the limits of solidarity

Beneath the security drama runs a quieter story about who is invited into the Japanese social contract. Japan is ageing and shrinking. Its fertility rate is close to that of South Korea and far below replacement. There are not enough young workers to sustain pensions, health care and regional economies. In practice Japan has already become a country that relies on foreign labour, from construction and factories to care work and agriculture.

The official language is cautious. Government white papers talk about skilled workers, orderly coexistence and mutual respect. Takaichi herself campaigned on the need for foreigners to obey Japanese law, pledged to crack down on illegal work and visa overstays, and promised to review land purchases near military facilities. She presents this as basic prudence rather than hostility to migrants. Her allies insist that Japan is simply doing what every serious state must do in an age of strategic competition.

The lived reality looks harsher. The Technical Intern Training Programme and related schemes have long been criticised as pipelines for cheap and easily controlled labour, not genuine skills transfer. Investigations and academic work have documented excessive recruitment fees, contracts that punish workers for leaving abusive employers, wage withholding and threats of deportation. Even recent moves to create new visas for so called specified skilled workers often keep people on a short leash, with limited routes to settlement or citizenship and uneven protection of labour rights.

In both Japan and the UK, this produces a strangely split politics. The language of solidarity and fairness is preserved, but the architecture of welfare is quietly narrowed. Certain groups become structurally convenient to squeeze. They are asked to do more work for less security while being blamed, directly or indirectly, for putting pressure on public finances. In Japan’s case, that pressure is made more visible by demography: the country needs migrant workers to care for its elderly but is reluctant to admit that this also means a long term, multi ethnic future.

A generation raised on anxiety and identity

One of the more striking changes in recent surveys is the attitude of younger Japanese voters. For years they were described as apathetic, more interested in games and pop culture than in ballots or barricades. That stereotype is now out of date. Polling of eighteen and nineteen year olds shows high levels of anxiety about national security, economic prospects and social cohesion. They have lived with missile alerts on their phones and headlines about Chinese incursions for as long as they can remember.

Takaichi’s politics speak directly to those fears. She offers a story in which a serious government stops apologising, invests heavily in technology and defence, and refuses to let the country be taken advantage of by outsiders, whether they are strategic rivals in Beijing or low wage workers who are easy to blame. Social media amplifies this blend of grievance and pride. Clips of the prime minister framed as an iron lady sit alongside nationalist memes, critical coverage from Chinese outlets, and anti immigrant content from smaller parties that talk about land, culture and safety.

There is also resistance. Student groups, peace organisations and some opposition politicians warn that the country is sliding into a familiar pattern in which fear justifies permanent emergency, emergency justifies permanent military build up, and the space for independent media and civil society narrows. They point to Takaichi’s past support for stricter control over broadcasters and her willingness to accuse domestic critics of undermining national unity. In their view, the Taiwan confrontation is not just about deterrence. It is a domestic instrument for remaking Japan at home.

The risk of locking in a story that cannot end well

Strip away the rhetoric and the incentives are brutally clear. Beijing benefits from framing every Japanese move as proof that old militarism is back. It uses that story to justify its own rearmament and to rally domestic opinion around the party. Takaichi benefits from pointing at Chinese pressure to show that her hard line was justified all along. She uses that story to push defence spending, constitutional revision and a more exclusionary welfare settlement.

What disappears in this feedback loop is any honest engagement with what a stable regional order would actually require. Japan has legitimate reasons to worry about Chinese power and to strengthen its own defences. China has legitimate reasons to object to any foreign military intervention over Taiwan. Neither set of interests is served by pretending that the second world war never ended or that contemporary migrants are a threat to civilisation.

The danger for Japan is that a necessary shift in defence posture is being carried out under a narrative that ties national pride to historical amnesia and selective solidarity. That makes compromise over Taiwan harder, dialogue with neighbours more brittle, and domestic debate more polarised. Once history and welfare have been wired into the same frame as war and deterrence, every concession looks like betrayal, not adjustment.

In that sense, the comparison with Scotland and the wider UK is not about headline issues but about the underlying logic. Governments that claim to stand for fairness and responsibility are squeezing the same groups again and again while insisting that nothing fundamental has changed. Takaichi’s Japan is simply a sharper and more openly militarised version of that pattern. The question is whether Japanese society is willing to accept that trade, or whether a different coalition will emerge that can take security seriously without rewriting the past or narrowing the circle of belonging.

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