Why Japan will not come to Taiwan’s rescue

This article first appeared on Pacific Forum and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here.

Taiwan hopes that if China attacks Taiwan that Japan will come to its rescue.

A poll conducted by the Tokyo-based Central Research Services on the behalf of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan found that 77% of Japanese feel close to Taiwan. Of the survey group, 72.8% said that the relationship between Taiwan and Japan is “good” or “somewhat good,” while only 1.2% said it was “bad” or “somewhat bad.”

Perhaps it’s because of numbers like this that nearly 60% of Taiwanese believe Japan would dispatch the Self-Defense Forces to come to their assistance in the event of an attack by China, according to a 2021 Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll.

Are such hopes misplaced?

“People greatly admire Taiwan, they love Taiwan. One of the reasons they love Taiwan is no other country in the world loves Japan as much as the Taiwanese But there is a big gap between that sort of warm and fuzzy ‘we like you, admire you’ and all that, and sending troops into harm’s way,” Jeffrey Kingston, a professor of Asian Studies at Temple University, Tokyo, told Voice of America.

“There is an expectation in Washington that Japan would intervene, and I think [the] political leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party thinks they should intervene, but the public is extremely leery of Japan going beyond its pacifist constitution,” he said.

All of this seems at odds with the constant visits to Taiwan by Japanese VIPs proclaiming “Taiwan’s defense is Japan’s defense.” Yet, other than a recent Japanese Coast Guard exercise with a Taiwan Coast Guard ship, the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) does not maintain a