Japanese Lawmakers Push For A New Maritime Security Pact With Taiwan As East Asia's Nuclear Risks Grow

Yoshihiko Yamada, an upper house lawmaker from Japan's Democratic Party for the People who has spent years studying ocean policy, told Taiwan's 2026 Taiwan Ocean International Forum that institutionalized cooperation between Taiwan and Japan at sea effectively began in 2017, when Japan's Coast Guard and Taiwan's Ocean Affairs Council signed a maritime search and rescue agreement under then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. With regional powers now trying to unilaterally rewrite the maritime status quo and international ocean affairs growing more tangled, Yamada argued, Taiwan and Japan should widen their cooperation well beyond what their coast guards already do together.

Akimasa Ishikawa, a member of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the lower house, framed the stakes in economic terms, noting that Japanese industries from semiconductors and batteries to automobiles and rare earths remain heavily dependent on Chinese supply chains. Japan, he said, once hoped that continued dialogue with Beijing would resolve differences, but has gradually concluded that a change in China's leadership is growing less likely and that political familiarity between the two sides keeps eroding. From the standpoint of Japan's economic security, he argued, Taiwan and Japan need tighter coordination across energy supplies, undersea cable security and industrial supply chains alike.

The forum, hosted in early July by Taiwan's Ocean Affairs Council, drew a range of Japanese guests, from think tank specialists to sitting lawmakers. Among them was Hideshi Tokuchi, who once led the Defense Policy Bureau at Japan's Ministry of Defense and served as the country's first vice minister of defense for international affairs before retiring in 2015. He has since headed the Tokyo based Research Institute for Peace and Security since 2021.

Tokuchi told the forum that the rules based international order the United States has largely underwritten since the end of World War II is gradually fraying, a process he linked to the unpredictable and less restrained style of the current Trump administration compared with its predecessors. He argued that East Asia has become more dangerous precisely because it hosts three authoritarian, nuclear armed states, China, North Korea and Russia, all of which are expanding their arsenals while deepening cooperation with one another, with Iran increasingly drawn into that orbit as well.

"We must never indulge the fantasy that we can befriend one of these states in order to strike at another and drive a wedge between them," Tokuchi said. "We need the capacity to respond to all of them simultaneously. I believe the degree of collusion among them keeps rising, and because European security and Asian security are now intertwined, we have to stand together, since no single nation can meet today's challenges alone."

Tokuchi also urged countries in the region to remember what happens when a power vacuum opens up, arguing that much of China's current clout in East Asia traces back to gaps left behind as Western powers withdrew from the region over the decades, gaps Beijing then filled step by step.

"Just think about what has happened in the South China Sea over a long stretch of time," he said. "France withdrew from Vietnam in the 1950s, and Chinese influence moved into the eastern half of Indochina. The United States pulled out of Vietnam in the mid 1970s, and China extended its reach across all of Indochina. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Vietnam, and China pushed into the South China Sea. By the early 1990s, once the United States withdrew from the Philippines, China took control of Mischief Reef." The lesson from that history, he said, is that once a power vacuum appears somewhere, the task is to keep any other power from moving back in to fill it.

Yamada, who also spoke at the forum, helped form a cross party group of Japanese lawmakers in June called the Diet Members' Association for Thinking About Peace and Stability in the Taiwan Strait, alongside conservative upper house member Haruo Kitamura and Ishin no Kai lawmakers Kaoru Nishida, Mitsuhiro Yokota and Seki Hei. According to news coverage from the time, the five cross party lawmakers see peace in the Taiwan Strait as inseparable from Japan's own security and plan to hold monthly study sessions with outside experts on the Taiwan Strait situation, Japan's security posture and Taiwan Japan cooperation, aiming to feed their findings into policy recommendations and legislative work back in Tokyo.

Yamada told the forum that the new caucus already counts more lawmakers than any other Taiwan focused group in Japan's parliament, reflecting how strongly both his own Democratic Party for the People and the governing Liberal Democratic Party feel about Taiwan related issues. "We are living through a chaotic era, whether in geopolitics or at sea, and the Strait of Hormuz is proving just as difficult," he said. "Taiwan and Japan face two shared problems in particular. One is the Malacca Strait, where we must protect freedom of passage. The other is the Taiwan Strait itself. If Taiwan's freedom there comes under threat, ordinary people's lives in both Taiwan and Japan will feel the consequences."

Yamada added that Japan already cooperates on maritime affairs with a number of like minded Asian partners, including India, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, alongside Taiwan. "If the waters around Taiwan cannot be protected, whether in the South China Sea or the East China Sea, peace in either of those areas becomes impossible to maintain," he said. "Taiwan and Japan already have cooperation between our coast guards, and the next step is to study maritime security in far more detail. We may not reach agreement on everything, but we need to keep talking until we find a mechanism that leads to real solutions." Ishikawa, for his part, said he hopes Taiwan and Japan can support one another during a crisis and work together to safeguard both countries' economic and security interests.

Original Article in Chinese

（Related： Lai Ching-te Honors Abe’s Legacy: Taiwan-Japan Security Ties Vital for Indo-Pacific Stability ｜ Latest ）