Defence Posture

Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi delivered her first parliamentary policy address since winning a commanding supermajority in this month’s lower house elections on Friday, using the platform to announce the most sweeping overhaul of her country’s security architecture in decades, a package that encompasses weapons exports, intelligence reform, foreign investment screening, supply chain independence, and nuclear energy, framed explicitly around the threat she believes China poses to the regional order.

The address, delivered to both chambers of the Diet in Tokyo, came twelve days after the Liberal Democratic Party captured 352 of the 465 lower house seats in a snap …