How in the world is Japan going to simply think or assume that they can have their cake and eat it too.
The Kishida administration is going balls to the walls in backing up US interests, although unfortunately this is a general trend across the Japanese leadership.
Abe did not join the West in putting sanctions on Russia after 2014 and continued to make efforts towards dialogue over the Kurils, but then he turned around and claimed the Ukraine war should serve as justification for hosting US nuclear weapons in Japan *facepalm*
Now with Kishida, Japan is joining in on the sanctions (here we see a weird half-baked effort here too, Japan rails against Russia but remains part of the Sakhalin-2 oil/gas project...) against Russia, being more vocal over Taiwan than ever, and pushing claims of China's human rights abuses.
I think part of the issue is that the Japanese government has a very poor understanding of China's interests and intentions. They expect China to behave like a "backwater" dictatorship, putting the economy ahead of any "frivolous" political goals. This is no doubt reinforced, if not caused by, racism in the LDP. The other side of it is the general trend of pushing China to the brink and then crying wolf when they respond as seen in the US.
They have no idea what they are driving headlong towards.
It's rather ironic, as a few months ago, NHK aired two rather curious documentaries- one about how Japan allied with Germany during WWII, with a final message of it being dangerous to ally with countries one thinks are strong or invincible (Japan's attack on the US was largely predicated on Germany defeating the Soviet Union in a matter of months), the other about how the Japanese government absolutely sucks at crisis response, based on the example of Fukushima.
Those in power at the time, including the former Prime Minister Kan Naoto himself, stated that Japan is not ready to respond to a major crisis event, and that there has been basically no improvement in the mechanisms or thinking surrounding such a response.
According to the documentary, it took a week for them to actually start looking at potential scenarios instead of merely
reacting to what was happening, and it took a phone call from the commander of the US forces in Japan to get them to deploy the JSDF to drop water on the overheating reactors with helicopters.
I wouldn't be surprised if Kishida and the rest of the US-backed leadership are going into their confrontation with China with the same amount of awareness (basically zero).
