Japan

An unexpected partnership was forged last week at India’s defence exhibition, DefExpo 2018, in Chennai. For some time, India has been in negotiations with Japan to purchase more than a dozen US-2 amphibious aircraft for the Indian Navy and Coast Guard. Considered the world’s best amphibious

Japan’s whale hunters are expected home any day, carrying up to 300 minke whales killed in the Southern Ocean. A harpoon ship, Yushin Maru No. 2, quietly slipped into Shiogama Port on Saturday, while the giant abattoir ship Nisshin Maru is still at sea (with its marine tracking monitor turned off

A battle is underway between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in over their differing approaches to North Korea. They are competing to shape the attitudes of US President Donald Trump, and this contest has been a compelling sideshow at the PyeongChang Winter

Pity the news subeditor in summertime Australia. It’s January, the days are languid, and even the Trump administration can’t fill the entire World News section. Unsurprisingly, then, some headlines published in the lead-up to last week’s meeting between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm

Wednesday 29 November in Tokyo, and the morning's breaking news was not Kim Jong-Un firing another missile but that sumo grand champion Haruma Fuji had announced his retirement following a week of scandal surrounding an alleged attack on a junior wrestler. As the two stories played

Recent news that Australia’s Foreign Minister has indicated interest in taking part in a resurrected US-Australia-Japan-India quadrilateral dialogue on the sidelines of the upcoming ASEAN Summit is to be welcomed. It is an indication how much the strategic situation in the Asia Pacific has shifted

By David Vallance, an intern in the Lowy Institute's International Security Program, and Euan Graham, Director of the International Security Program. The road to nuclear Armageddon is not straight. The North Korea crisis has led commentators to reassess the conventional wisdom that, when it

President Duterte returned last night from a three-day working visit to Japan, his second bilateral trip to Tokyo since taking office in June 2016. This visit took place only two weeks before Duterte and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will rub shoulders at the APEC meeting in Danang and Duterte

Australia’s ties with Japan constitute one of the world’s most well-rounded bilateral relationships. The past decade alone has witnessed the achievement of several major milestones. Of particular significance has been the landmark Joint Defence and Security Cooperation (JDSC) agreement in 2007

In 1999, India’s then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, travelled to Tokyo to smooth ruffled feathers after India's nuclear tests of that year. 'Relations between Japan and India are basically good', declared Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, damning with faint praise.' But the nuclear issue

For many international observers, the Japanese economy is an enigma. On the face of it, the economy has been in bad shape ever since the Japanese stock market began to crash in late 1989, almost 30 years ago. Yet as you wander around Japan, both in Tokyo and across the country, it hardly seems a

Paper cuts The prospect of the foreign policy White Paper emerging as a longer term bipartisan framework must be in doubt after the Labor Party demanded this week that its Asian Century document be treated as the key foundation. This is more than simple political point scoring because the

This month Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) - which is led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - experienced its first major electoral defeat since Abe’s inauguration in December 2012. The Tomin First no Kai (‘Tokyoites First’, known as Tomin), a local political party led by the Governor of

Last month Japan’s Shinzo Abe marked a political renaissance that few would have expected when he secured an unusual second go at being prime minister at the 2012 election when his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) returned to power. Abe is now the third longest serving prime minister in the post-

Yesterday afternoon International Security Program Director Euan Graham spoke with prominent Japanese Sinologist Seiichiro Takagi, Senior Research Advisor at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, on the Chinese Communist Party's upcoming 19th National Congress, President Xi Jinping's

Concern over the possible decline of US power and the resilience of its commitment to underwriting security in Asia is not new. In the post-1945 period, doubts over Washington’s commitment to maintaining a leadership role in the region have followed President Nixon’s shift to the Guam Doctrine

Vladimir Putin’s visit to Japan later this week is not interesting in itself. Rather, it is the strategic environment in which it is happening that holds our attention. Through this visit we can discern what the world’s powers think a Trump administration may mean for them, and see how they

In May 2012, Japan and Australia signed a bilateral information-sharing agreement. There was little media coverage in either country and neither government faced any political backlash. In the same year, Japan and South Korea were supposed to sign a similar agreement with the inelegant acronym