by WorldTribune Staff, November 11, 2025 Real World News

For decades, Japan’s leaders had deferred to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and rarely brought up the geopolitically sensitive Taiwan issue publicly. It was seen as part of Tokyo’s atonement for its invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s even though the communists had not yet taken power in that era.

That unwritten rule held firm until December 2021, when former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had been out of office for 16 months but was still politically powerful, said: “A Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency, and therefore an emergency for the Japan-U.S. alliance. People in Beijing, President Xi Jinping in particular, should never have a misunderstanding in recognizing this.”

With Abe’s shocking assassination on July 8, 2022, which was  celebrated in China, Tokyo’s foreign policy establishment were back in power and threats to Taiwan from China’s PLA intensified.

However new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a conservative protege of Abe, has again clarified a widely-held but seldom articulated stance: Any attack on Taiwan would be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan.

According to an Asahi Shimbun report, Takaichi said during a House of Representatives budget committee meeting on Nov. 7: “If warships are used and there is military action, it could clearly be seen as a crisis that threatens Japan’s existence.”

Edo Naito, a commentator on Japanese politics, law and history, noted: “Takaichi is saying out loud what we all know — what was said in the hallways, or behind closed doors, or what some Japanese political leaders are afraid to speak because their entirely one-sided CCP relationships might be stained a bit.”

The CCP’s propaganda machine is likely to allege that Takaichi is changing Japan’s “One China Policy,” or “encouraging a Taiwan independence movement,” or “reverting to 1930s militarism.”

Naito noted: “No, it is not. I argue instead that Japan is not speaking to Taipei at all, but directly to Beijing, and that we are encouraging the CCP leadership to stop and think long and hard before making any miscalculations that destroy the peace in our neighborhood. The U.S. president says this will not happen while he is in office, but Japan needs this to be clearly understood in Beijing for the long term.”

The new prime minister in Tokyo “is stating what should be self-evident to everyone,” Naito added. “If China militarily attacks Taiwan, Japan cannot help but see this as a direct, serious national security threat to itself and all that entails.”

In a post to LinkedIn, independent journalist Matthew Fulco noted that as China’s “hegemonic and irredentist ambitions intensified, Japan had to shift gears. Like the Philippines, the other Taiwan neighbor that would be severely impacted by a cross-Strait war, Japan has faced relentless PRC encroachment on seemingly obscure but strategically important territory.”

According to reports, Chinese ships were seen for a record 353 days near the Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands in 2024. The record could be broken this year.

“The uninhabited Senkakus are near major shipping lanes, are rich in fisheries and may, under the seabed, contain significant oil and gas reserves,” Fulco wrote. “While maintaining extensive economic and cultural ties with China, Japan is one of the only East Asian countries that has historically rejected Chinese hegemony.”

Japan exited the Chinese tributary system in the mid-16th century.

“For Takaichi to prioritize a stable relationship with Beijing – as she mentioned during her recent meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping – while holding firm against Beijing’s territorial adventurism is consistent with how Japan has approached the bilateral relationship for centuries.”

In a Nov. 10 op-ed for The Washington Times, Miles Yu noted how, since the People’s Republic of China was founeded in 1949, “the Chinese Communist Party has projected an image of a ‘peace-loving’ civilization wronged by imperialism and devoted to harmony. Yet from the Korean War to Ukraine, from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, the historical record exposes a very different truth.”

“The CCP, not the United States, has been the principal engine of global instability since the end of World War II, as today’s China is a revolutionary regime whose survival depends on perpetual struggle, conquest and deception,” wrote Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute.

“Communism, by its very nature, is a militant ideology. It regards peace not as a moral good but as a temporary pause between battles. Mao Zedong built his regime on the doctrine of permanent revolution, declaring that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Like the Soviet Union before it, the CCP must continually demonstrate its vitality through conflict to preserve its myths of infallibility and invincibility. For the CCP, aggression is not an aberration but an existential requirement.”

Since World War II, no other nation on the planet “has initiated so many wars and border conflicts,” Yu added. “Yet generations of Western apologists — from the so-called FOCs (Friends of China) such as Henry Kissinger to today’s loathsome clowns such as Jeffrey Sachs — have continued to parrot Beijing’s propaganda that China is uniquely ‘peaceful’ and ‘non-expansionist.’ ”

The CCP’s global strategy, Yu contents, is to “bleed the United States through endless peripheral wars, to fragment the Western alliance system and to reshape the world order in a way that normalizes dictatorship and punishes democracy. The CCP’s method is to let others fight while it profits from the chaos, an updated version of Vladimir Lenin’s dictum that ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’ ”

The CCP’s ideology “exalts struggle; its diplomacy cultivates instability; its economy fuels tyrants,” Yu added.

“Although Washington’s foreign policy has often been imperfect, the United States has been a stabilizing force, defending free nations, rebuilding shattered economies, and anchoring the international order in law and restraint. Beijing, by contrast, equates peace with submission and ‘cooperation’ with obedience. Wherever Chinese influence spreads, repression, conflict and fear soon follow.

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  PM Takaichi ends Tokyo’s pro-CCP consensus: Attack on Taiwan ‘threatens Japan’s existence’, WorldTribune.com