A ‘family affair’: Just how far will Japan go with Taiwan?
An in-depth piece of writing to stand in for 'Policy Opportunities'
In lieu of this week’s Policy Opportunities, today I wrote an in-depth piece on a story I’ve been covering — Taiwan-Japan’s burgeoning relations.
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A ‘family affair’: Just how far will Japan go with Taiwan?
Murmurs of excitement filled the air as suited reporters began tapping hurriedly on their laptops.
Seated toward the back of the conference room, I caught the eye of the think tank director who’d invited me to the conference. “The deputy defense minister… this is amazing!”
I cast an eye down the speaker list but no ‘Deputy Defense Minister’ could I see.
Our V-VIP guest soon staged his surprise ‘virtual drop-in’ on the projector screens above. Appearing in an immaculate Tokyo office in a crisp suit with a flag over one shoulder, Yasuhide Nakayama readied himself with a touch of hairspray before dropping the day’s headline through a warm smile…
“Japan considers Taiwan’s security its own affair” — furious tapping of keyboards.
“Taiwan and Japan are not friends…” pausing for effect… heads looking up quizzically... “we are family !” — a crescendo of tapping.
The event showcased a line-up of scholars, think tankers, and legislators who together spent the morning speculating on where bilateral relations in the wake of the recent "2+2" meeting between leaders from Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
The conference produced another string of headlines that Taiwan and Japan are moving irreversibly toward a new breakthrough in bilateral relations. It was as I sat in the newsroom the next day writing up a wire story on Beijing’s predictable response — “extremely absurd…” “a dangerous direction…” — that I recalled what Stephen Nagy had told me a week earlier during a podcast recording, that things might not be what they seem.
How far can this go?
“The way some of the media has portrayed Japan fundamentally changing its position vis a vis Taiwan is wrong,” said the Tokyo-based Canadian scholar.
“Their preference is maintaining the status quo… as it ensures peace and stability for all the relevant stakeholders.”
Nagy, a veteran Diet-watcher who predicted Suga’s imminent resignation almost to the day, told me there was no tacit support for Taiwan’s aspirations for independence among defense circles.
“For Tokyo there is a real concern that Taiwan could be a stepping stone to a broader security challenge to Japan and its peripheral islands,” he said. “Japan’s position is really wedded to promoting the status quo between the mainland and Taiwan.”
Japan’s latest defense white paper, released in July this year, states "the stability of Taiwan's situation is vital to Japan's security and the stability of the international community."
Seen from Nagy’s perspective, the “stability” here may hint at a deeper commitment to the status quo more than anything else.
“Japan still has a one China policy… and does not want to embolden pro-Independence forces in Taiwan, nor does it want to embolden hawkish PLA types in China that are advocating for a quick unification with Taiwan,” he said.
Nagy says Japanese security experts fear taking a more strident approach with Taiwan for fear of inadvertently backing Xi into a corner which would launch him to attack Taiwan. This would have a disastrous impact on Japan’s broader security and could set back peace and development in the region potentially decades, he adds.
Japanese policymakers are extremely conscious of a burgeoning Chinese nationalism that has been emboldened by COVID-19, seeing the pandemic as further evidence America is in terminal decline and that China’s time has come.
“Nobody wants conflict in the region, including China,” Nagy says, “but the nationalist forces in these countries could push their leaders into this situation.”
And the winner is…
Which Japanese leader would be at the helm to weather such a storm is currently anyone’s guess. With the resignation of Prime Minister Suga earlier this month, the race is on to pick the country’s next leader.
In the ongoing deliberations among his fellow LDP party members, Nakayama assured us, candidates’ Taiwan policy is a major factor in determining who will be chosen to take up the mantle.
The four candidates have certainly been brandishing their Taiwan credentials since.
There is frontrunner Taro Kono, Japan’s vaccine tsar, early to back Taiwan to join the WHA in 2019 and who called for a cross-national alliance to curtail Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific last week. Fumio Kishida, the former defense minister and another close contender, told Bloomberg earlier in the month Taiwan will be the “next big problem” for Japan and wants to forge closer ties. Then there is Sanae Takaichi, the only female contender, who not only wants to meet Tsai Ing-wen and has named the Taiwanese president a role model, but has also said Japan needs “to prepare for a new war” with China.
“There may be a different tone. Takaichi will be the toughest and Kishida may be the softest against China, but there won’t be a big change in the overall policy,” Professor Kazuto Suzuki of Tokyo University has said.
And so it seems, as is common in Japanese politics, a change of leadership is unlikely to bring a change in policy, at least not in regards to Taiwan.
So close, yet so far?
Below the overtures of candidates though, on the ground Japanese military hardware is moving closer to Taiwan.
Japan’s Minister of Defense Kishi Nobuo said in July that Japan’s new deployment of an additional 500-600 “missile defense personnel” to Ishigaki, a territory just 332 km east of Taiwan, could provide an umbrella of fire support for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
Talking to CNN yesterday, he said Japan would have to intervene in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, but that this response would focus on “dialogue” rather than “violence.”
Could the missiles not be there to ensure Japan’s own islands aren’t threatened were an invasion to occur? Could the optics of geographic proximity here and the supposed closeness of the military partnership be a false equivalence?
This is where Nagy’s view may come in, we may consider this as not so much a change in policy itself, but a change in the way it is communicated. Tokyo may also simply be mirroring Beijing’s own change in tone.
Though China never renounced using force to take Taiwan in earlier times when talk of “peaceful reunification” was more in vogue, it is only more recently that it has expressed its aggressive intentions more overtly in its diplomacy. Similarly, Japan’s support for Taiwan, which has remained steady yet suppressed for decades, is now finding more explicit expression at the official level.
As one speaker said at the conference, the silver lining to Chinese aggression in recent years is that it has brought democratic countries, including Taiwan and Japan, closer together.
Next steps
There are a couple of clear steps Tokyo could take next.
There is an easy win open to Tokyo should it wish to up the ante further -- allow Taiwan to change its representative office name from ‘Taipei’ to Taiwan. A trend first started by Lithuania in August, it is rumored other European countries are looking at something Biden is now ‘seriously considering’. This is of a soft upgrading in relations, which takes advantage of the grey zone that lies between a full embassy — which only exist in Taiwan’s 15 remaining allies — and a ‘Taipei trade office’. The move takes advantage of the grey zone between official and unofficial relations. This method affords Taiwan the dignity of using its own name, yet leaves room for recourse with Beijing seeing the office is not an actual embassy. Were Washington to press ahead as it suggests it will, it would be easy for Tokyo to follow suit.
A bigger step would be to pass a law regarding Taiwan ties. At the conference, DPP Legislator Lo Chih-cheng, who participated in the 2+2 dialogue, said Japan and Taiwan lack the pillars that make the US-Taiwan relationship so robust. Japan’s Diet has not passed a ‘Taiwan Relations Act’ — a law that officially defines non-diplomatic relations with Taiwan — as the US Congress has. The 2+2 dialogue, not being at the official state level but at the party level, is an example of ‘track 1.5 diplomacy’ and is a step forward. Yet a relations act would be more than a cosmetic change but a real upgrading in the capacity of the bilateral relationship.
Walking the Line
When the LDP’s Aso Taro said in July the U.S. and Japan would have to defend Taiwan, William Sposato wrote the gaffe-prone 80 year old veteran politician’s comment “may have been less of a gaffe than a deliberate signal—one with enough plausible deniability for the Japanese government to get away with it.”
This may best of all encapsulate Tokyo’s approach of late — feeling out the line to see just how much they can get away with rhetorically while keeping their feet within the diplomatic bounds of realism.
As Sposato said, Tokyo’s signals toward Taipei have “moved from nods and winks to open smiles.”
It may be too soon to tell what kind of facial expression Japan may pull in the event of a real crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Nagy may be right that triggering a crisis with Beijing is not in Japan’s interests, yet it seems Tokyo knows where that line is now. How else could it be so confident walking all the way up to it?
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- Liam
Founder of Policy People