EDITORIAL: Alliances, security, cooperation

On Tuesday, two delegations of Japanese lawmakers came to Taiwan to meet President William Lai (賴清德) at the Presidential Office. The first, led by Haruo Kitamura of the Conservative Party of Japan, represented the Diet Members’ Association for Peace and Stability in the Taiwan Strait cross-party parliamentary group; the second was led by former Japan Innovation Party (JIP) leader Nobuyuki Baba, head of the JIP’s Japan-Republic of China Friendship Study Group. The JIP is a junior coalition partner of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is president of the LDP.

Kitamura called Taiwan Japan’s “most important friend” and said that peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait are “vital to Japan’s very survival.” He called for economic and security cooperation between the two countries and referenced the passage of a Japanese version of the US’ Taiwan Relations Act (TRA).

Baba spoke to Lai about the need for cooperation between Tokyo and Taipei on regional security issues; Lai said that he believed the visits would help advance former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

As the heads of delegations of Japanese lawmakers, neither Kitamura nor Baba represented the Japanese government. However, the utility of parliamentary groups is that they can reveal things that official government representatives are prohibited from saying.

A member of Kitamura’s delegation, JIP lawmaker Hei Seki, took advantage of that extra flexibility. On Wednesday, he spoke at the Taiwan-Japan Foreign Affairs and Defense Forum in Taipei, calling for Taiwan to be included in a triangular alliance of the US, Japan and Taiwan to ensure regional stability in the face of challenges created by aggression from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). More controversially, he said that he supports the restoration of diplomatic relations between Taiwan and Japan, and seconded Kitamura’s call for a Japanese TRA. He also took the opportunity on Friday to travel to Kaohsiung to visit the bronze statue of Abe in the grounds of the Baoan Temple (保安堂) in the municipality’s Fengshan District (鳳山). This was not just sightseeing; there was a purpose behind his visit. It was Abe who had linked CCP military aggression against Taiwan to an existential threat to Japan.

There is little love lost between Seki and the CCP. Chinese by birth, his Japanese name is a transliteration of his Chinese name Shi Ping (石平). During the Cultural Revolution, his parents were sent to the countryside for “political re-education.” He moved to Japan in 1988, the year before the Tiananmen Square crackdown, became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 2007 and has served in the Japanese House of Councilors since last year.

On Sept. 8 last year, the CCP placed sanctions on him, citing the spreading of “fallacies” about Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, freezing his assets in China and prohibiting him and his family from entering China, Hong Kong or Macau.

When he arrived in Taipei’s Songshan Airport in January this year, he said that his ability to enter Taiwan demonstrated that Taiwan is not part of China, affirming its status as an independent country.

Seki has called the sanctions a badge of honor. Tokyo protested the sanctions as a form of intimidation.

The CCP’s resort to intimidation tactics was also called out on Tuesday by Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro Jr at the Seoul Defense Dialogue.

If Seki’s visit to the Abe statue in Kaohsiung hinted at the importance of regional stability in the face of CCP aggression, Teodoro’s was more explicit, and fully in line with Manila’s approach of “assertive transparency” to expose China’s destabilizing behavior. In terms of the messages sent, the Japanese delegations’ visits and Teodoro’s reaction are not unrelated. They link the need for transparency and recognition of the Chinese threat to regional stability, as well as the importance of showing a united front against it.

Tokyo and Manila are cooperating on shoring up regional stability. Japanese lawmakers are visiting Lai and talking of the need for security cooperation. Economic cooperation is part and parcel of this relationship. A Japanese TRA would be helpful; restitution of diplomatic recognition is perhaps a bridge too far, at least for now. When Seki talks of alliances, they should probably think about inviting Manila to the party, too.