Resilience comes from redundancy

The First Island Chain is one of the most powerful geopolitical features in the Indo-Pacific region. It is also an incomplete one. Drawn as a strategic line stretching from Japan through Taiwan toward the Philippines, it highlights military geography while largely overlooking the islands, ports and communities that connect across these waters.

The journey from Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture down the Nansei Islands (commonly known in English as the Ryukyu Islands) offered a different perspective, travelling via Amami-Oshima and Okinawa, on to Ishigaki Island of the Yaeyama Islands at the southernmost tip of the Ryukyu archipelago, and then to Taiwan. Traveling through these islands and ports, I saw a maritime geography in which places that appear close on a map can remain disconnected in practice.

The strategic question should not be only how to defend the First Island Chain, but how to reconnect the maritime space within it.

This is not an entirely new idea. The Ryukyu Kingdom was once a major hub of maritime exchange linking Japan, China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Naha, the capital of Okinawa, was a node in a wider network extending across the East and Southeast Asian seas. Routes also connected the Ryukyu Islands with Amami-Oshima and Kagoshima and onward into the Japanese archipelago.

These sea-route networks served the political and commercial interests of their time and should not be romanticized. Yet they reveal an enduring geographical fact: The sea can connect islands as much as it separates them.

That connectivity was reshaped, for very different purposes, under the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan. In the late 19th century, Japan developed shipping and communications links between Taiwan and the Japanese archipelago through the Ryukyu Islands. A shipping route connected Kobe with Keelung via Kagoshima and Okinawa. Even more strikingly, a submarine telegraph cable linked southern Kagoshima with Amami, Okinawa and the Yaeyama Islands before reaching Keelung.

This was an imperial network, built for administrative and strategic purposes, but its geography is revealing. The islands between Japan and Taiwan were not peripheral spaces. They functioned as nodes in a wider system of maritime transport and communications.

What if that geographical logic were applied to the 21st century?

I propose a modern Ryukyu Kaido (sea route) — a resilient maritime network beginning with stronger connections between Taiwan and Japan’s southwestern Islands, and eventually extending toward the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

It should not mean building one grand ferry route between Taiwan and Japan. A Ryukyu Kaido in the 21st century should be a network, not a line. Ferries, Roll-on/Roll-out (RoRo) vessels, cargo shipping, ports, tourism, logistics and air links should complement one another.

The immediate priority is the Taiwan-Ryukyu connection: Taiwan with the Yaeyama and Miyako Islands, Okinawa and, further north, Amami and Kagoshima. Where direct connections are commercially difficult, complementary routes and alternative modes can provide the missing links.

Three priorities should follow. First, Japan and Taiwan should explore practical pilot connections for passengers and freight, including ferries and RoRo services, while coordinating customs, immigration and quarantine procedures at participating ports. Second, ports and telecommunications networks should be designed with greater redundancy, including alternative shipping routes and submarine-cable links. Third, local and national authorities should establish mechanisms for disaster response and information sharing across the islands.

Connectivity should be treated not simply as an economic benefit, but as a form of resilience. Typhoons, earthquakes and port closures can isolate islands as effectively as other crises. If one route fails, a resilient network should allow people, goods and essential services to move through another.

Nor is connectivity only about ships. The Ryukyu Kaido could link physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure and people. Ports and shipping would form one layer; undersea cables, satellite communications and other telecommunications another. Disaster-response arrangements, information sharing, tourism and people-to-people exchanges would add further layers.

Taiwan already understands the importance of such redundancy. Its Ministry of Digital Affairs has been developing additional submarine-cable routes, backup communications, microwave links and satellite systems to reduce the impact of cable disruptions.

The lesson is simple: resilience comes from redundancy.

The same principle should apply to the maritime geography around Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands. Security should not mean making islands self-contained. It should mean ensuring that no single disrupted route can isolate an island from the wider region.

This is where the Ryukyu Kaido challenges the conventional geopolitical map. The conventional map sees islands as positions to be defended. The alternative map sees them as nodes to be connected.

The resilient network could eventually extend southward toward the Philippines and, over time, into wider Southeast Asian maritime networks. However, the immediate task is more modest: strengthen the Taiwan-Ryukyu core and demonstrate that connectivity can reinforce resilience.

The goal is not to recreate the maritime worlds of the Ryukyu Kingdom or the imperial era, but to recover a geographical insight that both histories make visible: islands need not be isolated spaces. Japan and Taiwan can begin by treating maritime transport, ports, telecommunications, tourism and disaster preparedness not as separate policy silos, but as mutually reinforcing parts of a resilient network. The First Island Chain need not remain merely a strategic line on a map. It can become a network of maritime connections — a Ryukyu Kaido for the 21st century, with the sea itself serving not as the space between Taiwan and Japan’s islands, but as the road that connects them.

Yasuyuki Ishida is a Japanese academic specializing in Japan-India relations, maritime security and the Indo-Pacific region, with a research focus on maritime connectivity and resilience.