Japan and China

Asia's two largest economies are each other's neighbours, major trading partners and oldest rivals. Japan's army made war on China from 1931 to 1945 and killed millions; China has never believed Japan's remorse to be sincere. Since 2010 China has been the larger and stronger of the two, and Japan has tied itself more closely to the United States and begun the largest military build-up in its postwar history. In November 2025 Japan's new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could be a threat to Japan's survival, the legal ground for using force. China has punished Japan ever since.

Where it stands · September 2026

Japan's defense budget request reached a record high. Families of Chinese wartime forced laborers sued six Japanese firms. Prime Minister Takaichi met Trump in New York, and China warned ahead of Xi's visit. Japan and the United States agreed to collaborate on various issues over China. China urged Japan to correct its Taiwan stance.

What the dispute is about

Taiwan. Japan's westernmost island is a hundred and ten kilometres from Taiwan, and the sea lanes that feed Japan run past it. China regards any Japanese role there as a former coloniser's return.

Who is the rising threat. Japan points to a Chinese military budget several times its own and to Chinese ships off its islands daily. China points to a Japan casting off, one by one, the limits it accepted after 1945.

The islands and the past. Five uninhabited islets that Japan administers and China claims, and a war whose memory China's government keeps alive and part of Japan's governing party would rather revise.

How each side explains it

Tokyo's account

Japan has not fired a shot in anger in eighty years. It faces a nuclear-armed neighbour whose military spending has grown thirtyfold in a generation, whose coast guard enters Japanese waters most days of the year, which fired missiles into Japan's economic zone in 2022 and locked weapons radar on Japanese aircraft. The prime minister stated what the law has said since 2015. China's answer was a diplomat's public threat to cut off her head, bans on Japanese fish, tourists and pop concerts, the arrest of Japanese businessmen and a squeeze on rare earths. That is coercion, and the reply to it is deterrence, allies and patience.

In our coverage

Taiwan/Japan under Chinese coercion; deterrence and administration legitimate →195 headlines
Covered by:Japan Times · Kyodo News · Asahi Shimbun · Bloomberg · NHK World · Nikkei Asia

Beijing's account

Japan seized Taiwan in 1895 and held it for fifty years, invaded China and killed more than twenty million of its people. In 1972 it promised to respect that Taiwan is part of China. Now a prime minister who worships at the shrine of convicted war criminals declares that Japan may fight China over Taiwan, doubles the military budget, buys missiles that can reach Chinese cities, lifts the ban on selling weapons and prepares to rewrite the pacifist constitution. The victims of Japanese militarism have every right to be alarmed, and to demand that she retract.

What each account leaves out

Tokyo's leaves out that the prime minister and several of her ministers belong to circles that question the record of Japan's wartime conduct, which is why neighbours read Japanese rearmament differently from German; and that the great changes in its military posture were made by cabinet reinterpretation, without the constitutional amendment they would seem to need.

Beijing's leaves out that Japan apologised formally in 1995 and gave China three and a half trillion yen in aid over forty years, which Chinese schoolbooks do not mention; that its own consul threatened a foreign leader and was not recalled; and that its military build-up and its ships around the islands are the argument Japan's hawks had been waiting for.

The opposition's and business's leaves out that accommodation was tried for a decade while China's presence around the islands grew every year.

The ledger

Japan

Wanted: security against a stronger China without losing its market.
Did: armed, aligned with Washington, Manila and Canberra, and spoke plainly once.
Gained: an electoral mandate for the build-up.
Paid: tourists, seafood sales, rare earth supplies, detained citizens, and an ally in Washington who may settle with Beijing first.

China

Wanted: Japan kept out of the Taiwan question and out of the ranks of normal military powers.
Did: punished.
Gained: a warning to others.
Paid: a Japan more united behind rearmament than at any time since the war.

Words in dispute

Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.

survival-threatening situation
remilitarisation, neo-militarism / normal country
Senkaku / Diaoyu
economic coercion / lawful countermeasures
the 1972 consensus
history issue
Taiwan contingency

Japan and China

What the dispute is about

How each side explains it

Tokyo's account

Beijing's account

What each account leaves out

The ledger

Japan

China

Words in dispute

Primary actors

Also involved

The account of Japan's opposition and much of its business

Business and ordinary travellers on both sides

What changed the course