Barely a hundred people braved the harsh Tokyo winter to attend the protest that November evening. Yet outside the Naikaku Sori Daijin Kantei, the complex where Japanese prime ministers have lived and worked since the 1920s, demonstrators dispensed with customary politeness, shouting ‘Takaichi resign!’ Megaphones blared, ‘Japan must not forget the lessons of its history. Sanae Takaichi has destroyed the long relationship of trust between China and Japan. She’s not fit to be prime minister!’ In a country no longer accustomed to political gatherings, the images made for striking television.

Earlier that month, the prime minister had told the lower house that Japan would consider Chinese military intervention in Taiwan as an existential threat to Japan, justifying the engagement of its Self-Defence Forces. No leader before had ventured such a provocation. Even Shinzo Abe, with his strong conservative and anti-Chinese positions, ‘never touched this issue’, said a senior member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the ruling party over which Takaichi presides.

China’s response was swift: seafood imports were halted, tours by Japanese musicians were cancelled and Chinese tourists were urged not to visit Japan. Chinese visitors account for the largest number of tourists to Japan (nearly 7 million in 2024) after Koreans. Joint Chinese and Russian military exercises in the Yellow Sea were quickly answered by the overflight of a nuclear-enabled US bomber escorted by Japanese fighter jets.

China is the world’s second largest economy and Japan’s most important trading partner but relations with the LDP are tense. The party is known for its revisionist rhetoric – on the colonisation in Manchuria, the sexual slavery practised by the Japanese army before and during the second world war, and the Nanjing Massacre. China commemorated the massacre’s anniversary on 13 December, in the midst of the diplomatic crisis. <exergue|texte=America’s (…)

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(1) Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo, Harvard University Press, 2018.

(2) With the exception of ‘moderate interludes’ under Fumio Kishida (2021-24) and Shigeru Ishiba (2024-25).

(3) See Renaud Lambert, ‘Japan’s red scare’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August 2025.