Japan, explained.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hosts Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at Parliament House in Canberra on 4 May 2026 (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
Tokyo’s warming to Canberra tracks directly with its cooling on Beijing.
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“Why would Japan meet with a small country like Australia?”“Why would Japan meet with a small country like Australia?”
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s visit to Australia this week will cement a bilateral relationship that has been growing closer for decades – economically, diplomatically and more recently, militarily.
There is one obvious driver of that – the rise of China – which Australia and Japan both see as threatening to choke their strategic space in the region and squeeze their sovereignty.
The incentives to do more have been sharpened by US President Donald Trump, who has been alternately ambivalent and hostile to longstanding allies and played down China as a rival.
But Japanese leaders didn’t always see the point of getting closer to Australia, as Alexander Downer, then Foreign Minister, found when meeting his Japanese counterpart, Yohei Kono, in Tokyo in 2001. Downer suggested to Kono that the US, Japan and Australia should have a regular strategic dialogue at the Foreign Minister level. Kono wasn’t interested.
“Australia is not to be compared with the United States,” he said. “Why would we meet with a small country like Australia?”
The anecdote, contained in journalist Tony Parkinson’s recent book on Downer, A Step to the Right, reveals a lot about Japanese politics a quarter of a century ago, and how Tokyo and Canberra arrived at the close relationship they have today.
China has few friends at senior levels of Japanese politics. Nor does it seem to want to make them.
Kono was right on one level. The Australian economy was much smaller than Japan’s at the time. In 2000, Japan’s economy was 11 times as large as Australia’s. Now, it is only about two-and-half times as large – an enormous change.
Australia’s population has grown strongly since the turn of the century, a result of an immigration program supported by both major parties. Japan’s population has been falling since 2010.
Australia has also enjoyed a two-decade long resources boom, largely courtesy of China’s rapid industrialisation, which has made the country richer. Japan’s economy, by contrast, endured a prolonged downturn from the mid-1990s.
Japan’s weak currency in recent years slightly exaggerates the economic comparison, but even then, Australia is a bigger, better-resourced and more attractive partner to Japan than it was 25 years ago.
Australia’s then foreign minister Alexander Downer, right, shakes hands with his Japanese counterpart Yohei Kono during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Bandar Seri Begawan in November 2000 (Jimin Lai/AFP via Getty Images)
The other reason for Japan’s enthusiasm, though, and one not well appreciated in Australia, is the evolution in the country’s internal politics and the hardening of attitudes to Beijing.
Kono was long a leading member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s pro-China faction. The year before the Downer meeting, he made a speech in Beijing at the communist party’s top training school, saying that building closer China ties had been one of his career’s core goals.
Kono’s principles were much to his credit on one level, most notably in a statement he issued in 1993 as Cabinet Secretary confirming the Imperial Army’s role in coercing so-called “comfort women” to work in wartime brothels. Sections of the Japanese right had tried to suffocate discussion of the issue by denying the women had been coerced and were highly critical of Kono.
At the time, Kono reflected a widely held sentiment inside Japan’s ruling party and its coalition partners, which wanted strong ties with China to balance the US alliance. Over time, however, the number of senior Japanese politicians sympathetic to China has fallen dramatically, in line with the increasingly negative view towards Beijing among the Japanese public.
The same goes for the so-called “China School” in the Foreign Ministry, whose diplomats the late Shinzo Abe regarded as too accommodating to Beijing. As Prime Minister, Abe dismantled their influence.
China’s size alone has made it a much more formidable, and intimidating, competitor to Japan. China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy in 2010. It is now nearly five times as large.
But the main driver of change in Japan is the perception that no matter what Japan does – including apologising for the war – an authoritarian Beijing will remain unremittingly and ruthlessly hostile to it.
There is no better example of changed attitudes than Kono’s son, Taro Kono, who was Foreign Minister for two years from 2017. Kono Jnr was more hawkish than his father, something that infuriated China.
“Your father was an honest politician,” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Kono Jnr when they met in Manila in 2017. “I hope you will place weight on the lessons of history that he went through and his accurate opinion.”
In brief, China has few friends at senior levels of Japanese politics. Nor does it seem to want to make them. Former trade and industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura is in China this week. Tellingly, he has no meetings with Chinese officials on his agenda.
All of which helps explain why Takaichi, and her colleagues in the Japanese government and bureaucracy, have worked so hard to build ties with Australia. Australia’s own views on China, and concerns about the US, mean she has been pushing at an open door.
About the author
Richard McGregor
Richard McGregor was Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, and a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia.
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