This chapter examines how Japan perceives, encourages and instrumentalises the growing engagement of Italy, and of Europe more broadly, in the Indo-Pacific. Drawing comprehensively on official policies, public opinion polls and academic scholarship, it argues that Japan has come to treat European participation as a structural component of its Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) vision rather than as a symbolic supplement. Confronted with an increasingly transactional United States and with intensifying Chinese economic coercion, Tokyo is pursuing a deliberately multilayered strategy in which the European Union provides normative and economic ballast, while individual member states supply committed operational presence. Within this design, Italy has emerged as a privileged industrial and military partner, exemplified by the Global Combat Air Programme, the 2024 carrier strike group deployment and the Special Strategic Partnership proclaimed in 2026. The chapter also assesses recent domestic political shifts underpinning Japan’s more assertive posture and the immediate challenges – American unpredictability, Chinese retaliation, domestic constraints and European capacity limits – that could yet slow this Euro-Japanese convergence.

 

Introduction

Over the past decade the Indo-Pacific has displaced the Euro-Atlantic region as the primary theatre of great-power competition, concentrating the majority of global economic growth alongside the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints. Japan was the first state to translate this geographical intuition into a coherent strategic programme. When then Prime Minister Shinzō Abe launched the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) concept in Nairobi in 2016, he offered a vocabulary – the rule of law, freedom of navigation, quality infrastructure and connectivity across two continents and two oceans – that has since been absorbed, with notable national variations, by the United States, ASEAN member states, India and, belatedly, Europe. Between 2018 and 2021, France, Germany and the Netherlands adopted national Indo-Pacific strategies or guidelines, followed by the European Union itself, while Italy, though it has never published a formal strategy document, has arguably become the most dynamic European newcomer to the region.

This chapter examines these developments from the vantage point that matters most for their long-term viability: Tokyo’s. As the principal architect of, and chief demandeur for, Indo-Pacific coalition-building, Japan is not a passive beneficiary of European attention but an active shaper of it. Japanese diplomacy spent years persuading European capitals that the security of Europe and that of the Indo-Pacific are indivisible. It must now decide how much strategic weight to assign to the resulting engagement, and how to reconcile it with an American alliance that has become simultaneously more indispensable and less predictable.

The argument advanced here rests on three claims. First, Japan’s FOIP has evolved from an aspirational vision into an operating system for statecraft, within which the diversification of partnerships is a deliberate hedge against both Chinese coercion and American transactionalism. Second, Tokyo assigns differentiated roles to Europe: the European Union is valued primarily as a normative, regulatory and economic-security partner, while individual member states – above all France, Germany and Italy – are valued as providers of military presence, defence-industrial cooperation and diplomatic weight within the G7 and NATO. Third, Italy has undergone the most remarkable trajectory of any European state in Japanese strategic thinking, moving within half a decade from near-invisibility to the status of quasi-ally, anchored by the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) and consecrated by the bilateral Special Strategic Partnership of January 2026.

Nevertheless, the chapter emphasises that this European layer complements, and cannot substitute for, the Japan–US alliance, and it proceeds in four substantive steps: Japan’s own role conception in the Indo-Pacific; its cooperation with the EU; its cooperation with Italy; and the immediate challenges confronting both.

 

Japan in the Indo-Pacific: The FOIP and Japan’s Envisioned Role

The genealogy of FOIP is well established. Abe’s 2007 address to the Indian Parliament on the confluence of the two seas prefigured the formal launch of the concept at the Sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VI) in Nairobi in August 2016, where the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Asian and African continents were presented as a single strategic space to be ordered around freedom, openness and the rule of law ^[1] . The initiative combined three components: the promotion of universal norms, the pursuit of economic prosperity through connectivity and quality infrastructure, and a commitment to peace and stability delivered largely through capacity-building for maritime law enforcement in littoral states.^[2]

Scholars have debated whether FOIP is best read as soft containment of China or as an order-shaping enterprise that leaves the door open to Chinese participation on Japanese terms. Koga (2020) characterises it as a form of institutional balancing that seeks to socialise, rather than simply exclude, Beijing; Satake and Sahashi (2021) similarly stress that Tokyo has calibrated FOIP to avoid forcing Southeast Asian states into binary choices. At the same time, the competitive dimension is unmistakable: FOIP emerged in explicit counterpoint to the Belt and Road Initiative and to China’s maritime assertiveness in the East and South China Seas ^[3] . This duality – inclusive rhetoric wrapped around hard-edged balancing – remains the defining tension of Japanese regional strategy.

FOIP was institutionalised in December 2022, when the Kishida government adopted a new National Security Strategy together with a National Defense Strategy and a Defense Buildup Program.^[4] The documents identified China as the greatest strategic challenge, committed Japan to acquiring counterstrike capabilities and to raising defence-related spending to two percent of GDP by 2027, and – crucially for present purposes – elevated the construction of a multilayered network of allies and like-minded partners into a formal pillar of national security policy. ^[5] Hughes (2022) describes the cumulative result as Japan’s emergence as a genuine global military power, characterised by deeper alliance integration and a distinctive bilateralism-plus in which webs of bilateral ties are knitted into minilateral and plurilateral formats. Kishida’s March 2023 New Plan for FOIP, announced in New Delhi, extended the vision towards the Global South, with India and ASEAN as indispensable partners. ^[6]

Japan’s internal politics have since shifted markedly, with direct consequences for its regional posture. Sanae Takaichi, elected in October 2025 as the country’s first female prime minister and widely seen as Abe’s ideological heir, assumed office at the head of a reconfigured coalition after Kōmeitō’s departure ended a twenty-six-year partnership.^[7] Within weeks she was engulfed in the gravest Sino-Japanese crisis in a decade: her statement in the Diet on 7 November 2025 that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a survival-threatening situation permitting collective self-defence provoked furious protests from Beijing,^[8] followed by escalating economic retaliation that culminated in January 2026 in export controls on rare earths and other dual-use items – materials for which Japan relied on China for roughly two thirds of its imports. ^[9] Takaichi declined to retract her remarks, and her government pressed ahead with the deployment of surface-to-air missile units to Yonaguni, barely 110 kilometres from Taiwan.

Far from weakening her, confrontation consolidated her position. Calling a snap election in late January 2026, Takaichi led the Liberal Democratic Party to the largest lower-house majority in its post-war history, securing a supermajority that has made revision of Article 9 of the constitution politically attainable for the first time.^[10] The Diet had already approved Japan’s largest-ever defence budget in December 2025, reaching the two-percent threshold two years ahead of schedule, ^[11] and the government committed to revising all three strategy documents during 2026 while overhauling intelligence structures and further relaxing arms-export rules.^[12] Whether these shifts help or hinder Japan’s regional role is genuinely double-edged. On the one hand, a stable government with a clear mandate has accelerated FOIP diplomacy, defence-industrial opening and coalition-building; on the other, Takaichi’s assertiveness has hardened confrontation with Beijing, complicated the inclusive narrative that made FOIP palatable to ASEAN, and tied Japan’s regional standing to a constitutional project whose referendum stage remains deeply uncertain.^[13]

The clearest programmatic statement of the new course came on 2 May 2026, when Takaichi used a speech in Hanoi to unveil an updated FOIP built on three priorities: economic infrastructure for the age of artificial intelligence and data, including resilient supply chains for energy and critical materials; the co-creation of growth opportunities through public–private collaboration and shared rules; and intensified security cooperation for regional stability. ^[14] Pledging that Japan would be more proactive than ever, she framed the update explicitly against the twin backdrop of Chinese pressure and uncertainty about the United States. ^[15]

That uncertainty is in fact the second structural driver of Japanese strategy. The second Trump administration subjected the alliance to what Japanese commentators experienced as a stress test: sweeping tariffs resolved only in July 2025 through an agreement imposing a fifteen-percent rate alongside a 550-billion-dollar Japanese investment pledge; public demands that Tokyo raise defence spending towards 3.5 or even five percent of GDP; the cancellation of a scheduled 2+2 ministerial meeting; and a looming renegotiation of host-nation support.^[16] Japanese polling registered a collapse of confidence in Washington’s reliability, and senior LDP figures spoke openly of disrespect.^[17] Yet the operational alliance has proved resilient – command-structure integration has continued around Japan’s new Joint Operations Command – and Takaichi invested heavily in personal diplomacy with President Trump in Tokyo in October 2025 and in Washington in March 2026^[18]. The lesson Tokyo has drawn is not to abandon the alliance but to insure around it.

Insurance takes the form of a dense regional lattice in which region-wide coalition-building and intensely bilateral agreements deliberately coexist. Japan continues to invest in the Quad and in trilateral formats with the United States, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines,^[19] while simultaneously constructing bilateral instruments of unprecedented depth. The Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) with the Philippines – signed in July 2024, approved by the Diet in June 2025 and in force since 11 September 2025 – is emblematic: the first such agreement with a Southeast Asian state, it was applied within weeks to a bilateral disaster-relief exercise, and discussions have followed on transferring Abukuma-class escort vessels to Manila. ^[20] With Australia, an RAA has been in force since 2022 and Canberra’s selection of an upgraded Mogami-class frigate design in 2025 made Japan, for the first time, the source of a major allied warship programme; Takaichi’s visit to Australia in May 2026 deepened the agenda further. With India, the August 2025 summit produced a Joint Vision for the next decade and a ten-trillion-yen private investment target, followed in July 2026 by Takaichi’s visit to New Delhi, a first joint defence co-development pact and exploratory talks on frigate co-production.^[21] Japanese vessels have meanwhile joined multilateral maritime cooperative activities with American, Australian and Philippine forces inside the South China Sea – calibrated but unmistakably assertive shows of presence along the first island chain. It is into this lattice that Europe has been invited.

 

Japan’s Collaboration with the European Union in the Indo-Pacific

The Japan–EU relationship rests on an unusually complete contractual base. The Economic Partnership Agreement, in force since 2019, created one of the world’s largest free-trade areas; the Strategic Partnership Agreement, applied provisionally from 2019 and fully in force since 1 January 2025, provides the political framework; and a 2019 connectivity partnership aligned Japanese and European infrastructure diplomacy as an implicit alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative. Japanese officials also worked assiduously to encourage a European Indo-Pacific turn: Tokyo welcomed the German Policy Guidelines of September 2020 and the French strategy as vindication of FOIP’s universality, and lobbied for the EU-level strategy that materialised in September 2021. ^[22] German and French scholarship of the period records both the momentum and the heterogeneity of European approaches – a heterogeneity Tokyo learned to navigate rather than lament.^[23]

The qualitative leap came on 1 November 2024, when Japan became the first Indo-Pacific country to conclude a Security and Defence Partnership with the EU. ^[24] The document expands cooperation well beyond traditional defence diplomacy into maritime security, cyber, hybrid threats and foreign information manipulation, space security, and – most consequentially from Tokyo’s standpoint – defence industry. It also created machinery: a foreign-ministerial strategic dialogue and an annual Security and Defence Dialogue, first convened in Brussels in June 2025 and again in May 2026, at which the Japanese side briefed the EU on the strategic evolution of FOIP and received, in MOFA’s telling, the EU’s understanding. ^[25] An EUobserver assessment captured the broader significance: the partnership reflects Japan’s ambition to act as a major power in its own right within a fragmenting order, not merely as Washington’s regional deputy. ^[26]

The thirtieth Japan–EU summit, held in Tokyo on 23 July 2025, consolidated this agenda around what the two sides styled a Competitiveness Alliance. The joint statement affirmed that the security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific are interconnected, endorsed cooperation on maritime security and the protection of critical undersea infrastructure under UNCLOS, welcomed the launch of negotiations on a security-of-information agreement, and – reflecting shared exposure to both Chinese export controls and American tariffs – placed economic security, supply-chain resilience and resistance to coercion at the centre of the relationship. ^[27] For Japan, whose 2022 strategy had already designated economic security a core national-security domain, the EU is the indispensable partner in this field: no other actor combines comparable regulatory weight, market size and normative alignment.

The war in Ukraine supplied the strategic glue. Japan’s uncompromising response – sanctions, financial support for Kyiv, and Kishida’s much-quoted warning that Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow – earned Tokyo standing in European capitals that decades of trade diplomacy had not, while North Korean troop deployments alongside Russian forces gave concrete form to the inter-theatre linkage both sides had previously asserted rhetorically. Japanese participation in successive NATO summits as an Indo-Pacific partner, and the EU’s reciprocal presence at Indo-Pacific ministerial forums – most recently the fourth EU Indo-Pacific Ministerial Forum in November 2025 – institutionalised the connection.

Tokyo has been equally attentive to what individual member states do at sea. France, a resident Indo-Pacific power with territories and permanent forces in the region, has exercised regularly with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, including through carrier deployments. Germany’s frigate Bayern in 2021 marked Berlin’s cautious return to the region, followed in 2024 by a two-ship deployment that included a Taiwan Strait transit and port calls in Japan. The Netherlands has attached vessels to British and other task groups. From a Japanese perspective, these deployments perform three functions: they normalise third-party naval presence in contested waters, diluting Beijing’s preferred framing of regional order as a bilateral Sino-American affair; they thicken the web of exercises, port calls and information exchange that underpins interoperability; and they signal to Chinese planners that a Taiwan or East China Sea contingency could carry European consequences. ^[28]

Japanese officials nonetheless retain a clear-eyed view of the division of labour. The EU as an institution is not a security guarantor and commands no fleets; its comparative advantage lies in rules, market access, sanctions capacity, technology partnerships and development finance. Tokyo has therefore adopted a deliberate two-track approach – EU-level cooperation for economic security, connectivity and norms; bilateral cooperation with capable member states for defence – and treats occasional European ambitions to speak with one strategic voice with polite scepticism. The still-unfinished security-of-information agreement, without which classified-information exchange remains constrained, illustrates both the promise and the current ceiling of the EU track.

 

Japan’s Collaboration with Italy in the Indo-Pacific

Within this European mosaic, Italy’s trajectory has been the steepest. Historically cordial but strategically thin, the bilateral relationship was transformed in barely four years. Giorgia Meloni’s visit to Tokyo in January 2023 upgraded ties to a strategic partnership; the consecutive Japanese (2023) and Italian (2024) G7 presidencies synchronised agendas on economic security and Ukraine; and the Japan–Italy Action Plan of June 2024 gave the partnership a structured programme across defence, economic security, science and culture for 2024–2027. ^[29] The intellectual foundations had been laid earlier: scholars had already identified in Abe-era Japan a Realpolitik openness to new security partners beyond Washington, ^[30] while Rome’s doctrine of an enlarged Mediterranean – subsequently stretched into a Global Mediterranean reaching the Indian Ocean – supplied the geographical rationale on the Italian side.^[31]

The hinge of the relationship is the Global Combat Air Programme, announced in December 2022, through which Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy are jointly developing a sixth-generation combat aircraft for service by 2035.^[32] Its significance for Tokyo can hardly be overstated: it is the first time post-war Japan has developed a frontline combat capability with partners other than the United States, and it required a politically fraught revision of arms-export rules to permit sales of the aircraft to third countries.^[33] Reported cost-sharing assigns roughly forty percent each to Japan and the United Kingdom and some twenty percent to Italy, whose industrial champion Leonardo anchors the Italian workshare.^[34] By early 2026 both governments described the programme as having entered its operational phase.^[35] GCAP embeds Italy in Japan’s defence-industrial future for decades – precisely the kind of mutual material dependence that Japanese strategy now prizes over declaratory alignment.

Military-operational cooperation caught up with industrial cooperation in 2024, when Italy despatched its first carrier strike group to the Indo-Pacific. Centred on the carrier Cavour and the frigate Alpino, accompanied at stages by the patrol vessel Raimondo Montecuccoli and the sail training ship Amerigo Vespucci, the five-month deployment was designed, as Patalano^[36] argues, not as flag-showing but as the presentation of professional credentials to Japan. The group became the first carrier formation to join Australia’s Pitch Black air exercise, conducted the first Italian multi-large-deck event with a US carrier strike group in the Pacific, and spent late August at Yokosuka base, where the Italian Navy declared initial operational capability for its embarked F-35Bs and exchanged short-take-off and vertical-landing expertise with Japanese naval and air officers.^[37] The Montecuccoli meanwhile conducted Italy’s first patrols in support of the UN sanctions-monitoring regime against North Korea – a contribution of direct value to Japan, which hosts the enforcement coordination cell. ^[38] Japanese defence officials framed the visit as the opening of a new era; the fact that Italian, French and German warships lay simultaneously alongside in Yokosuka in August 2024 gave Tokyo a tableau of exactly the multinational presence FOIP had sought.

Institutionalisation followed rapidly. An Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement, enabling reciprocal logistical support between the Self-Defense Forces and the Italian armed forces, entered into force in September 2025, and regular foreign-ministry strategic dialogues and politico-military talks now underpin joint training.^[39] The culmination came on 16 January 2026, when Meloni and Takaichi, meeting in Tokyo in the 160th anniversary year of diplomatic relations, redefined the relationship as a Special Strategic Partnership – a designation Japan otherwise reserves for a handful of countries such as India and Australia. ^[40] The joint statement is a revealing document of convergence: it opposes unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force in the East and South China Seas, reaffirms UNCLOS, deplores economic coercion and market-distorting practices – language read as aimed at Beijing’s export controls and, obliquely, at Washington’s protectionism – and launches cooperation on critical-minerals supply chains, a bilateral space dialogue and a structured dialogue linking Italy’s Mattei Plan for Africa with Japan’s TICAD process. ^[41] Implementation has been unusually brisk. In May 2026 Tokyo hosted the first sessions of the new bilateral economic-security dialogue and space dialogue; in June, Takaichi travelled to Rome – her first bilateral visit to Italy – where the two governments signed an intergovernmental memorandum on supply-chain resilience covering semiconductors, critical minerals and frontier technologies, announced a further Italian naval port call in Japan for September 2026, and coordinated positions ahead of the G7 summit.^[42] Bilateral trade reached some €12.3 billion in 2025, modest by Japanese standards but growing, with cooperation extending into artificial intelligence, biotechnology and next-generation civil nuclear energy. ^[43]

Why then, all of sudden, does Italy loom so large in Japanese eyes? Five reasons stand out. First, Italy is a G7 economy and EU founding member: cultivating Rome gives Tokyo an additional advocate inside both the G7 and Brussels. Second, Italian and Japanese strategic geographies are read in Tokyo as complementary – the Global Mediterranean and FOIP meet along the sea lines of communication running from Suez through the Indian Ocean, and Italy’s leading role in Red Sea escort operations demonstrated a practical commitment to the same maritime order Japan depends upon. ^[44] Third, defence-industrial cooperation with Italy diversifies Japan’s supplier base without the political sensitivities of dependence on Washington. Fourth, Rome’s exit from the Belt and Road Initiative was registered in Tokyo as evidence of durable China-scepticism.^[45] Fifth, and not least, the personal and ideological affinity between two stable conservative governments has lowered transaction costs: Meloni and Takaichi have met twice within six months and jointly authored calls for like-minded states to shape the global order. Japanese assessments are not uncritical – questions persist about Italian defence spending and the sustainability of episodic deployments – but the direction of travel is unambiguous: Italy has become the test case for Japan’s cultivation of new allies beyond its traditional circle.

 

Immediate Challenges

The first challenge is managing Washington. The 2025 tariff settlement stabilised but did not settle the economic relationship: the investment pledge attached to it remains subject to American discretion, tariff snap-backs are contractually possible, and host-nation-support renegotiation looms alongside continuing pressure – codified in the December 2025 US National Security Strategy – for Japanese defence spending well beyond two percent of GDP. ^[46] Tokyo’s insistence that force development is a sovereign decision has so far held, but the deeper problem is psychological: Japanese elite and public confidence in American reliability has eroded to historic lows, even as Japan’s exposure to Chinese pressure makes the alliance more necessary than ever.^[47] European partnerships mitigate this dilemma at the margins – they diversify defence-industrial risk and diplomatic support – but no European actor can replicate American extended deterrence, and Tokyo must calibrate its hedging so that it reads in Washington as burden-sharing rather than drift.

The second challenge is the unresolved crisis with Beijing. China’s response to the Taiwan remarks has settled into a grinding campaign of economic pressure whose rare-earth dimension strikes directly at Japanese – and European – industrial capacity, and analysts caution that both sides now have fewer off-ramps than in previous crises.^[48] Japan’s efforts to diversify critical-minerals supply, pursued for over a decade, remain incomplete. ^[49] The risks are twofold: escalation around the Senkaku Islands or the first island chain, where Chinese military activity has intensified; and the quieter risk that coercion succeeds in deterring third parties, including European states with their own dependencies, from deeper regional involvement. China’s pressure also targets the very minerals essential to GCAP, and European rearmament has, paradoxically, strengthened the logic of Japan–Italy–EU economic-security cooperation – but converting shared vulnerability into actual resilient supply chains will take years.

The third challenge is domestic. Takaichi’s supermajority is an unprecedented window, but constitutional revision still requires a national referendum whose outcome no poll guarantees, and an over-hasty push could reawaken the pacifist reflexes that constrained her predecessors. Japan’s fiscal position – the developed world’s highest debt ratio, an ageing society, persistent inflation – makes sustained spending above two percent of GDP contentious, while the Self-Defense Forces struggle with recruitment shortfalls that money alone cannot fix. ^[50] There is, finally, a diplomatic cost to assertiveness: the same posture that reassures Manila and Canberra unsettles parts of ASEAN, whose centrality the updated FOIP continues to proclaim.

The fourth challenge concerns European sustainability and coherence. European naval deployments remain episodic: a carrier group every few years is a signal, not a presence, and the war in Ukraine – together with renewed instability in the Middle East and around the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 – will continue to claim first call on European resources and attention. Member-state approaches to China still diverge, EU-level and national initiatives overlap, and Tokyo must orchestrate an increasingly crowded field of bilateral, minilateral and EU frameworks without duplication. Instruments matter too: until the Japan–EU security-of-information agreement is concluded, classified cooperation will lag behind political ambition.

Finally, the flagship itself carries risk. GCAP’s 2035 in-service date is demanding; sixth-generation programmes elsewhere have suffered cost growth and schedule slippage; workshare and export-policy differences among three democracies with distinct strategic cultures require constant management; and reported debates over admitting additional partners, such as Saudi Arabia, test trilateral cohesion. Since GCAP is the backbone of the Japan–Italy relationship, programme turbulence would reverberate far beyond industrial ministries. None of these challenges is unmanageable, but together they counsel against triumphalism: the Euro-Japanese convergence in the Indo-Pacific is real, yet recent and reversible.

 

Conclusion

Viewed from Tokyo, European participation in the Indo-Pacific has ceased to be a curiosity and has become a component of national strategy. A decade after Nairobi, FOIP functions less as a slogan than as an operating system through which Japan organises coalitions, allocates diplomatic capital and hedges risk. Within that system the European Union supplies what Japan’s other partners cannot – regulatory power, economic-security alignment and a second Western pole in an age of American unpredictability – while member states supply presence, exercises and industrial partnership. The November 2024 Security and Defence Partnership, the 2025 Competitiveness Alliance and the dense calendar of dialogues that followed have given this division of labour durable institutional form.

Italy occupies a special place in this design. In the space of four years, Rome moved from the periphery of Japanese strategic attention to the inner circle of the Special Strategic Partnership, propelled by GCAP, validated by the Cavour deployment and consolidated through economic-security, space and African-development cooperation. For Japan, Italy demonstrates that the cultivation of new allies can yield concrete capability and industrial depth, not merely communiqués – a lesson Tokyo is applying simultaneously in Manila, Canberra and New Delhi, where region-wide architecture and tightly drafted bilateral agreements deliberately coexist as mutually reinforcing layers of the same lattice.

Japan’s internal transformation under Takaichi – accelerated rearmament, the drive to revise Article 9, a harder line towards Beijing and a franker acknowledgement of American unreliability – has, on balance, enabled rather than hindered this outward turn, supplying both the political mandate and the sense of urgency that sustain it. But the same transformation has raised the stakes. Whether the Euro-Japanese convergence matures into a lasting pillar of Indo-Pacific order will depend on factors only partly within Tokyo’s control: the durability of European commitment beyond symbolic deployments, the discipline of the three-nation programme management in GCAP, the containment of the crisis with China, and the preservation of an American alliance that remains, for all its frictions, the foundation on which every other layer rests. Japan’s wager is that a multifaceted Europe – and a newly ambitious Italy – will help ensure that the Indo-Pacific’s future is written by many hands, and not dictated by one.

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Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (2022) France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, Paris: Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, available online at: https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/files/files/france_s_indo-pacific_strategy_2025_cle04bb17.pdf, accessed 19 July 2026.

MOFA (2024) Release of the Japan–EU Security and Defence Partnership, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1 November.

MOFA (2025a) Exchange of Diplomatic Notes for Entry into Force of the Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 12 August, available online at: https://www.mofa.go.jp/press/release/pressite_000001_01536.html, accessed 19 July 2026.

MOFA (2025b) Japan–EU Summit 2025 Joint Statement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 23 July.

MOFA (2026a) Japan–Italy Joint Statement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 16 January.

MOFA (2026b) The Updated ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP)’, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2 May.

MOFA (2026c) The 2nd Japan–EU Security and Defence Dialogue, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, May.

Pajon, C. (2025) “Japan Under Trump: Alliance Strains, the Push for Autonomy and Essential Partnerships”, Ifri,  available online at: https://www.ifri.org/en/external-articles/external-publications/japan-under-trump-alliance-strains-push-autonomy-and, accessed 19 July 2026.

Patalano, A. (2024) “What is an Italian carrier strike group doing in the Indo-Pacific?”, War on the Rocks, 29 August, available online at: https://warontherocks.com/what-is-an-italian-carrier-strike-group-doing-in-the-indo-pacific/, accessed 19 July 2026.

Pugliese, G., Patalano, A. (2020) “Diplomatic and security practice under Abe Shinzō: the case for Realpolitik Japan”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74(6), 615-632.

Satake, T., Sahashi, R. (2021) “The rise of China and Japan’s “vision” for free and open Indo-Pacific”, Journal of Contemporary China, 30(127), 18-35.

Scott, D. (2025) “On Wider Seas: Italian Naval Deployments and Maritime Outreach to the Indo-Pacific”, Center for International Maritime Security, 5 March, available online at: https://cimsec.org/on-wider-seas-italian-naval-deployments-and-maritime-outreach-to-the-indo-pacific/, accessed 19 July 2026.

Sposato, W. (2025) “Sanae Takaichi’s China fight may be trouble for Japan”, Foreign Policy, 25 November, available online at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/25/sanae-takaichi-china-japan-taiwan/, accessed 19 July 2026.

The Japan Times (2026a) “Takaichi and Italy’s Meloni agree to deepen security and economic ties”, 17 January, available online at: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/01/17/japan/politics/takaichi-italy-meloni-security-economic/, accessed 19 July 2026.

The Japan Times (2026b) “Japan struggling to reduce rare earth dependence on China”, 30 January, available online at: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/01/30/japan/china-rare-earth-dependence/, accessed 19 July 2026.

The Japan Times (2026c) “Takaichi pledges “more proactive” role for Japan in Indo-Pacific strategy update”, 2 May, available online at: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/05/02/japan/politics/japan-vietnam-foip-takaichi/, accessed 19 July 2026.

The Washington Post (2025) “Japan boosts defense spending amid China tensions, Trump urging”,  22 December, available online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/22/japan-defense-spending-boost/, accessed 19 July 2026.

Yamaguchi, M. (2025) “Japan says it plans to tell Trump it will build up military and upgrade security strategy”, Associated Press, 22 October, available online at: https://apnews.com/article/japan-us-trump-defense-visit-23ce735331adb5d2e15ea4ee60c90918, accessed 19 July 2026.

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^[1] Abe, S. (2016) Address at the Opening Session of the Sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VI), Nairobi, 27 August, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, available online.

^[2] Hosoya, Y. (2019) “FOIP 2.0: the evolution of Japan’s free and open Indo-Pacific strategy”, Asia-Pacific Review, 26(1), 18–28.

^[3] Insisa, A. , Pugliese, G. (2022) “The free and open Indo-Pacific versus the belt and road: spheres of influence and Sino-Japanese relations”, The Pacific Review, 35(3).

^[4] The three documents are the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program, all adopted in December 2022. The Takaichi government has committed to revising all three during 2026.

^[5] Government of Japan (2022) National Security Strategy of Japan, Tokyo: Cabinet Secretariat, December.

^[6] Kishida, F. (2023) “The Future of the Indo-Pacific: Japan’s New Plan for a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific”. Speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, 20 March, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

^[7] Kōmeitō, the LDP’s coalition partner since 1999 and a consistent restraining influence on security policy, left the coalition in October 2025. Its replacement by the right-leaning Japan Innovation Party (Ishin) removed an important internal brake on constitutional revision.

^[8] A survival-threatening situation (sonritsu kiki jitai) is one of the legal categories introduced by the 2015 Legislation for Peace and Security. Its recognition by the Cabinet permits the limited exercise of collective self-defence even where Japan itself has not been directly attacked.

^[9] CNN (2026) “Japanese PM’s Taiwan comments prompt China to ban certain exports to Japan”, 6 January, available online; Baskaran, G., Schwartz, M. (2026) “China’s Rare Earth Campaign against Japan”,  Center for Strategic and International Studies, 13 January, available online; Sposato, W. (2025) “Sanae Takaichi’s China fight may be trouble for Japan”, Foreign Policy, 25 November,  available online.

^[10] Lee, C. , Blane, B. (2026) “Japan First” in the Indo-Pacific: Takaichi’s shift from pacifist constraint to allied mobilization”, Small Wars Journal, 1 April, available online.

^[11] The Washington Post (2025) “Japan boosts defense spending amid China tensions, Trump urging”,  22 December, available online.

^[12] Congressional Research Service (2026) Japan’s Evolving Defense Policy and the U.S.–Japan Alliance, 14 July.

^[13] Constitutional amendment under Article 9 requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Diet followed by a national referendum – a hurdle no Japanese government has ever attempted to clear.

^[14] MOFA (2026b) The Updated ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP),  Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2 May; Bloomberg (2026) “Japan’s Takaichi outlines new Indo-Pacific strategy in Vietnam speech”, 2 May, available online.

^[15] The Japan Times (2026c) “Takaichi pledges “more proactive” role for Japan in Indo-Pacific strategy update”, 2 May, available online.

^[16] Pajon, C. (2025) “Japan Under Trump: Alliance Strains, the Push for Autonomy and Essential Partnerships”, Ifri,  available online; Govella, K. (2025) “Japan’s Response to Trump 2.0: Sustaining U.S. Ties, Strengthening International Partnerships”, Center for Strategic and International Studies,  available online.

^[17] Asia Society Policy Institute (2025) A Stress Test for Resilience: Risks and Opportunities for the U.S.–Japan Alliance, Asia Society Policy Institute, December, available online.

^[18] Yamaguchi, M. (2025) “Japan says it plans to tell Trump it will build up military and upgrade security strategy”, Associated Press, 22 October, available online; Congressional Research Service (2026) Japan’s Evolving Defense Policy and the U.S.–Japan Alliance, 14 July.

^[19] The Quad (Japan, the United States, Australia and India) has continued to meet at ministerial level, but leader-level momentum has slowed under the second Trump administration, reinforcing Tokyo’s interest in the Japan–Australia–India triangle within the grouping (ORF, 2026).

^[20] MOFA (2025a) Exchange of Diplomatic Notes for Entry into Force of the Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 12 August, available online; Japan Ministry of Defense (2025) First Application of the Japan–Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement. Tokyo: Ministry of Defense, October, available online.

^[21] Chinoy, S. (2026) “Modi–Takaichi Summit: Deepening India–Japan Ties in a Changing Indo-Pacific”, Observer Research Foundation, 1 July, available online.

^[22] Federal Government of Germany (2020) Policy Guidelines for the Indo-Pacific, Berlin: Federal Foreign Office, September, available online; Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (2022) France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, Paris: Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, available online; European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (2021) The EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, JOIN(2021) 24 final, Brussels, 16 September, available online.

^[23] Heiduk, F. , Wacker, G. (2020) From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific: Significance, Implementation and Challenges, Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik,  SWP Research Paper 9; Grare, F. , Reuter, M. (2021) Moving Closer: European Views of the Indo-Pacific, Berlin: European Council on Foreign Relations, September.

^[24]MOFA (2024) Release of the Japan–EU Security and Defence Partnership, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1 November; European External Action Service (2024) Japan–EU Security and Defence Partnership,  Brussels and Tokyo: EEAS, 1 November.

Japan was the first of nine such partnerships concluded to date under the framework created by the 2022 Strategic Compass; the others include South Korea, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway and Moldova (European Parliamentary Research Service, 2026).

^[25] MOFA (2026c) The 2nd Japan–EU Security and Defence Dialogue, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, May.

^[26] EUobserver (2025) “What does the new EU–Japan defence partnership actually mean?”, 15 January, available online.

^[27] Council of the European Union (2025) EU–Japan Summit, Tokyo, 23 July, Brussels: Council of the European Union;  MOFA (2025b) Japan–EU Summit 2025 Joint Statement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 23 July.

^[28] Scott, D. (2025) “On Wider Seas: Italian Naval Deployments and Maritime Outreach to the Indo-Pacific”, Center for International Maritime Security, 5 March, available online.

^[29] Kantei (2025) Japan–Italy Action Plan Fact Sheet, Tokyo: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, March.

^[30] Pugliese, G. , Patalano, A. (2020) “Diplomatic and security practice under Abe Shinzō: the case for Realpolitik Japan”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74(6),  615–632.

^[31] Patalano, A. (2024) “What is an Italian carrier strike group doing in the Indo-Pacific?”, War on the Rocks, 29 August, available online.

^[32] The programme is managed by the treaty-based GCAP International Government Organisation (GIGO), headquartered in the United Kingdom, and industrially by a joint venture uniting BAE Systems, Leonardo and Japan Aircraft Industrial Enhancement Co., itself anchored by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

^[33] In 2024 Japan eased its defence-equipment transfer rules specifically to permit the export of the future GCAP aircraft to third countries, a decision that was politically contentious at home and that Kōmeitō conditioned on case-by-case Cabinet approvals.

^[34]  Euronews (2026) “Italy and Japan upgrade ties to strategic partnership as Meloni meets Takaichi in Tokyo”, 16 January,  available online.

^[35] Decode39 (2026a) “Meloni and Takaichi push Italy–Japan ties forward”, 16 January, available online.

^[36] Patalano, A. (2024) “What is an Italian carrier strike group doing in the Indo-Pacific?”, War on the Rocks, 29 August, available online.

^[37] Mahadzir, D. (2024) “Carrier Cavour’s Pacific deployment extends Italy’s reach in the Pacific, says admiral”, USNI News, available online.

The experience is directly relevant to the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, which is converting its two Izumo-class helicopter destroyers to operate the F-35B; Italy has one of very few navies with recent carrier-based F-35B certification experience outside the United States and the United Kingdom.

^[38] Scott, D. (2025) “On Wider Seas: Italian Naval Deployments and Maritime Outreach to the Indo-Pacific”, Center for International Maritime Security, 5 March, available online.

^[39] MOFA (2026a) Japan–Italy Joint Statement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 16 January.

^[40] The Japan Times (2026a) “Takaichi and Italy’s Meloni agree to deepen security and economic ties”, 17 January, available online; Kantei (2026a) Japan–Italy Summit Meeting,  Tokyo: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, 16 January.

^[41] MOFA (2026a) Japan–Italy Joint Statement, Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 16 January; Euronews (2026) “Italy and Japan upgrade ties to strategic partnership as Meloni meets Takaichi in Tokyo”, 16 January,  available online; Decode39 (2026a) “Meloni and Takaichi push Italy–Japan ties forward”, 16 January, available online.

The Mattei Plan, launched in January 2024 with an initial endowment of some €5.5 billion, is Italy’s flagship framework for energy, infrastructure and development partnerships in Africa; TICAD (the Tokyo International Conference on African Development) has been Japan’s equivalent instrument since 1993.

^[42]  Kantei (2026b) Visit to Italy: Japan–Italy Summit Meeting in Rome,  Tokyo: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan, 15 June; Decode39 (2026b) “Italy and Japan move to operationalize the special strategic partnership”, 15 June, available online.

^[43] Decode39 (2026b) “Italy and Japan move to operationalize the special strategic partnership”, 15 June, available online.

^[44] Patalano, A. (2024) “What is an Italian carrier strike group doing in the Indo-Pacific?”, War on the Rocks, 29 August, available online.

^[45] Italy formally notified Beijing of its withdrawal from the Belt and Road Initiative memorandum in December 2023, the only G7 state ever to have joined it.

^[46] Pajon, C. (2025) “Japan Under Trump: Alliance Strains, the Push for Autonomy and Essential Partnerships”, Ifri,  available online; ; Govella, K. (2025) “Japan’s Response to Trump 2.0: Sustaining U.S. Ties, Strengthening International Partnerships”, Center for Strategic and International Studies,  available online.

^[47] Asia Society Policy Institute (2025) A Stress Test for Resilience: Risks and Opportunities for the U.S.–Japan Alliance, Asia Society Policy Institute, December, available online

^[48] Baskaran, G., Schwartz, M. (2026) “China’s Rare Earth Campaign against Japan”,  Center for Strategic and International Studies, 13 January, available online.

^[49] The Japan Times (2026b) “Japan struggling to reduce rare earth dependence on China”, 30 January, available online.

^[50]  Congressional Research Service (2026) Japan’s Evolving Defense Policy and the U.S.–Japan Alliance, 14 July; Lee, C. , Blane, B. (2026) “Japan First” in the Indo-Pacific: Takaichi’s shift from pacifist constraint to allied mobilization”, Small Wars Journal, 1 April, available online.

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• The Indo-Pacific and the European Approaches to the Region