{"id":40964,"date":"2026-06-15T13:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/40964\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T13:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T13:17:07","slug":"japan-taking-cautious-if-firm-approach-to-avoiding-escalation-with-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/40964\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan taking cautious \u2014 if firm \u2014 approach to avoiding escalation with China"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a weekend speech that struck back at Beijing\u2019s claims of a \u201cnew militarism\u201d<\/a> emerging in Japan, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told an audience of defense officials from across the globe that nothing could be further from the truth.<\/p>\n

But there was something missing from Koizumi\u2019s address: a direct mention of China.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a country that has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers. Japan has neither of such weapons. And yet Japan is labeled \u2018new militarism.\u2019 Isn\u2019t it strange?\u201d the defense chief said Sunday during the Shangri-La Dialogue regional security summit in Singapore, in a thinly veiled rebuttal of Beijing\u2019s claims that Tokyo is repeating the steps that led it into World War II.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Koizumi stressed that Japan\u2019s reputation as a pacifist nation \u201cwill not be shaken by disinformation and information manipulation\u201d \u2014 a jab at China\u2019s claims that Tokyo\u2019s defense buildup is a \u201cmenace, threatening regional peace and stability\u201d \u2014 his address also emphasized that \u201cJapan\u2019s door to dialogue is always open.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

A senior Japanese defense official later said that Koizumi had \u201creviewed this speech from start to finish, including what to say and how to phrase it,\u201d highlighting a careful approach that apparently sought to avoid unnecessarily angering Beijing as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi\u2019s government grapples with how to reinvigorate ties.<\/p>\n

Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, characterized Koizumi\u2019s approach as Tokyo \u201cdemonstrating that it is acting like a reasonable neighbor that is not seeking provocation, and its efforts to defend its interest should be seen in that context.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShould the PRC continue to couch these steps as \u2018militarism,\u2019 Beijing could end up painting itself as the unreasonable party,\u201d he added, using the acronym for China\u2019s formal name, the People\u2019s Republic of China.<\/p>\n

The reticence to directly name China and the emphasis on dialogue came as Koizumi\u2019s counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, delivered his own speech<\/a> that analysts said was remarkable for language that was noticeably softer on China than an address a year ago, when he warned of an imminent and \u201creal\u201d threat posed by Beijing to democratic Taiwan.<\/a><\/p>\n

In Saturday\u2019s address, the U.S. defense chief struck a markedly more conciliatory tone toward the rival superpower, saying that relations are \u201cbetter than they\u2019ve been in many years\u201d and pointing directly to last month\u2019s Beijing summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

Ryo Sahashi, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, said that while Koizumi\u2019s address and the exchanges that followed \u201csurely took into account the short-term stability in U.S.-China relations evident in Secretary Hegseth\u2019s own speech and at the recent Beijing summit \u2026 they…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a weekend speech that struck back at Beijing\u2019s claims of a \u201cnew militarism\u201d emerging in Japan, Defense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[12,462,360,1468,1180,177,179,26242,180,178,358,2303,2311,488],"class_list":["post-40964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-china","tag-china-japan-relations","tag-defense","tag-defense-ministry","tag-indo-pacific","tag-japans-politics","tag-japanese-politics","tag-pla","tag-politics","tag-politics-of-japan","tag-sanae-takaichi","tag-sdf","tag-shinjiro-koizumi","tag-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}