With a Taiwan contingency increasingly more plausible, Taiwanese lobbies in Japan are calling for the government to pass a version of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), emulating the US precedent. Such a measure would surely enable Tokyo to make formal and regular contact with Taipei for dialogue, consultation, policy coordination and planning in military security. This would fill the missing link of the trilateral US-Japan-Taiwan security ties, rendering a US military defense of Taiwan more feasible through the support of the US-Japan alliance.
Yet, particular caution should be exercised, as Beijing would probably view the move as a serious challenge to its ambition to annex Taiwan. Tokyo’s security-seeking move might then provoke Beijing only to destabilize cross-strait relations and possibly give it a pretext for aggression, as China is more confident than ever in its military power and coercive diplomacy.
