The Way of the Empire of the Sun

On July 8, 2022, during a campaign speech in Nara Prefecture, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot at close range with a homemade firearm. The attacker, Tetsuya Yamagami – a former member of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force – said he acted out of personal resentment toward the Unification Church, which he blamed for his family’s financial ruin. He associated Abe with the group. The incident exposed an unresolved tension within Japanese society, where religion, collective memory, and private trauma can collide in unpredictable ways.

Often labeled a conservative and nationalist, Takaichi supports strengthening Japan’s defense posture and revising Article 9 of the constitution – fully aligned with the strategic and tactical framework developed under Abe, including his economic doctrine. But labels oversimplify. To understand what is unfolding, one must read between the lines of Japan’s organic political texture.

In reality, the push to revise Japan’s defense posture stems from the worsening security environment in the Asia-Pacific region – paired with a growing perception that the United States, contrary to past assumptions, may no longer intervene automatically on behalf of others, except to defend itself. Between two risks, many in Tokyo now prefer the one that seems to be fading: dependence on a declining security guarantee.

This trajectory suggests that Japan’s shift cannot be attributed solely to the will or personality of a single leader. Rather, it reflects the emergence of a deeper national orientation, one that surfaces when both internal and external power dynamics begin to shift. Political leaders, in this context, are not originators but vessels of a broader current – one embedded in the nation’s strategic instinct.

The sea is both the alpha and the omega of Indo-Pacific power dynamics. To be or not to be a maritime power is the question that defines a nation’s ambitions and geopolitical trajectory. Japan is a maritime empire by nature; China aspires to become one out of necessity. The Japanese islands do not contain the sea – the sea shapes the archipelago, holds it together, nourishes it, and allows it to breathe. For Japan, the ocean has always symbolized the origin of life, creative energy, and national destiny. Water is fate. That is why, when Japan chooses to open or expand, it does so with the swiftness of a civilization that knows the sea as a second skin.

In the late 19th century, Japan’s imperial modernization followed a maritime path. Within just a few years, the country built a modern fleet and projected its influence into Manchuria, Korea, and across the Pacific. This was not a case of Western imitation – it was a return to an older calling, disrupted only by the enforced isolation of the Tokugawa shogunate. The arrival of the “Black Ships” in 1853 had shattered that equilibrium. Less than 50 years later, the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 established Japan as a naval power capable of defeating the Russian Empire in open waters.

Even earlier, in 1894, Japan had clashed with China in its first major modern war. The struggle for control of Korea marked the Imperial Navy’s first test. At the mouth of the Yalu River, Japanese warships dealt a decisive blow to the Chinese fleet and establishing its naval superiority.. The war ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895, which granted Japan control of Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands – both of which were quickly transformed into formal colonies, remaining under Japanese rule until 1945.

Tsushima was not seen as an endpoint but the beginning of a cycle. Japan embraced a philosophy of “copy, improve, innovate”: it bought foreign ships, studied them in detail, replicated and refined them. The process began with torpedo boats in the 1880s and evolved into full-scale domestic production of cruisers and eventually battleships.

That approach – humble, methodical, and bold – is a cultural legacy worth revisiting. Rather than chasing originality for its own sake or fearing imitation, there is strength in the will to learn, absorb, and surpass. The Japanese did not merely copy; they digested knowledge and turned it into power. It’s a mindset worth reclaiming, even beyond the maritime domain. By the end of World War I, Japan’s shipbuilding industry rivaled those of Britain and the United States. By the early 1920s, the Imperial Japanese Navy had become the third most powerful naval force in the world.

That momentum was broken only after Japan’s defeat in World War II, when the victors imposed a new order: the dissolution of the Imperial Navy and the adoption of a pacifist constitution.

Japan’s postwar maritime posture was not the result of an internal political choice, but a forced suspension of its naval history. The establishment of the Kaijō Jieitai – the Maritime Self-Defense Force – was a scaled-down, tightly monitored successor to the old Imperial Navy. Officially tasked with protecting Japan’s territorial waters, the MSDF has quietly preserved operational skills, naval traditions, and a sense of institutional memory. Beneath the surface, a subtle thread has kept alive the enduring bond between Japan and its surrounding seas.

On the surface, Japan now presents itself as a defender of Taiwan and a key promoter of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” Taiwan, which Japan annexed in 1895 and governed for half a century, retains deep historical and cultural ties to Tokyo. Despite its authoritarian nature, Japanese rule brought infrastructure, education, and modernization to the island, shaping a society that continues to look favorably toward Japan. Today, more than 75 percent of Taiwanese identify Japan as their closest international friend. South Korea ranks a distant second, named by just 4 percent of respondents, while both China and the United States trail at 3 percent each.

For Tokyo, defending Taiwan is about more than protecting a natural ally – it is also about preserving Japan’s own national security. Should the island fall under Beijing’s control, it would directly threaten Japan’s vital sea lanes and jeopardize its access to the Pacific Ocean. It is no coincidence that Japanese lawmaker and former Self-Defense Forces officer Sato Masahisa once remarked, “Japan and Taiwan are as close as the sea that separates them.” Military cooperation across the strait has never been stronger, with growing intelligence-sharing, military dialogue, and strategic alignment with the United States.

Beneath the surface of Japan’s defensive rhetoric lies a deeper, more strategic calculation. Taiwan’s defense is the means through which Japan aims to contain and neutralize China’s maritime expansion. Tokyo’s concern is not only about safeguarding a culturally aligned island – it is about preventing Beijing from gaining control over critical ocean routes, projecting power across the Pacific, and threatening global trade. In other words, preventing China from imposing its will through coercion.

Tensions between Tokyo and Beijing have continued to deteriorate. In a recent statement posted on X, the Chinese Embassy reiterated its commitment to peaceful reunification with Taiwan, but also renewed its warning that force remains on the table if “separatist” actions escalate. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks – suggesting that Tokyo could intervene under the principle of collective self-defense – were received in Beijing as an unacceptable provocation. The fallout triggered the most serious diplomatic crisis between the two nations in over a decade.

In response, China issued a warning to its citizens, advising against travel to Japan – a move widely interpreted as both a caution and a signal that tensions across the Taiwan Strait may soon escalate further.

Ours are aging, disillusioned societies – none excluded. Even Japan has not been spared this quiet neurosis. Since entering the American orbit after World War II, Japan has inherited not only institutional and strategic frameworks but also part of the Western psychological horizon.

Like many advanced nations, Tokyo now faces the challenges of a rapidly aging population and a younger generation increasingly weighed down by social pressure, lacking momentum, distrustful of the future, and worn by a silent sense of helplessness.

This condition – anticipated more than 30 years ago by American thinker Francis Fukuyama, of Japanese descent – has now fully materialized. His vision of the “last man” as history’s endpoint has become reality: individuals who appear fulfilled on the surface, but are internally hollowed out, marked by a kind of existential melancholy born from the absence of struggle, risk, transcendence, or the desire to leave a mark on history. The belief that material comfort could satisfy all human needs has dulled the instinct to reach for something beyond.

Adding to these structural tensions is Japan’s growing overtourism problem. In 2024, the country set a new record with around 36.9 million foreign visitors – surpassing pre-COVID numbers from 2019. The term kankō kōgai – literally “tourism pollution” – has gained traction in public discourse, describing the moment when tourism ceases to be a shared asset and becomes a constant source of disruption.

Locals are increasingly avoiding tourist-heavy districts; many schools have stopped organizing traditional class trips to Kyoto due to overcrowding and higher costs. At the same time, frustration is mounting over stagnant wages while foreign tourists – boosted by a weak yen – flood symbolic spaces, services, and public infrastructure.

In parallel, the debate over immigration has reemerged. Figures such as Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of Japan’s Immigration Bureau, have long proposed welcoming millions of foreign workers to sustain Japan’s productive base and counteract demographic decline. But Japanese society remains ambivalent—torn between the economic imperative to open up and the identity-based fear of losing its cultural cohesion. Immigration is widely seen as necessary, yet rarely accepted. It is one more unresolved tension weighing on the nation’s psychosocial stability.

And yet, recent years have shown that even so-called “senile” societies – tired, structurally weakened, or aging – are not immune to the call of conflict. Russia has been fighting a fratricidal war for nearly four years. The United States, marked by growing internal divisions and border tensions, continues to maintain its global empire. Israel, despite deep internal fractures, persists in its relentless campaign against the specter of terrorism. And the European Union – lacking a unified cultural identity and far from ready for a 20th-century-style war – has nonetheless resumed rearming in response to the perceived Russian threat.

War can arise from fear of decline, from the sense of encirclement, or from a will to reassert existence before others dictate its end. In certain conditions, it is perception – whether clear or distorted – of oneself and of others that reawakens latent impulses.

Japan will not turn a deaf ear to history’s call. With its legacy and identity, it cannot escape its fate.

Riccardo Ficicchia is a geopolitical analyst with the Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali (IARI).