Japan reaffirms plan to deploy missiles to area near Taiwan

Japan’s defense minister, visiting a military base close to Taiwan, said plans to deploy missiles to the post would move forward as tensions smolder between Tokyo and Beijing over the East Asian island, Bloomberg reports.

“The deployment can help lower the chance of an armed attack on our country,” Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters on Sunday as he wrapped up his first trip to the base on the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni. “The view that it will heighten regional tensions is not accurate.”

China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular briefing on Monday that the deployment of missiles would be “extremely dangerous” and described it as a “deliberate move that breeds regional tensions and stokes military rivalry.”

The plan to station medium-range surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni, about 110 kilometers east of Taiwan, comes as part of a broader military build-up on its southern island chain. The moves reflect Tokyo’s concerns about China’s growing military power and the potential for a clash over Taiwan.

When China responded to a visit to Taiwan by then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2022 by launching major military drills around the island, ballistic missiles landed just south of Yonaguni, providing a stark illustration of the proximity of the island to any conflict for control of Taiwan.

Japan’s fears of being embroiled in a Taiwan conflict were amplified by a dispute over recent comments by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi related to the self-ruling territory, which Beijing regards as a province that must be brought under its control, by force if necessary. Takaichi on Nov. 7 raised the theoretical possibility that Japan could deploy its military with other nations if China attacked Taiwan, drawing an angry response and economic retaliation from Beijing.

She has since reverted to the government’s longstanding policy of not discussing particular scenarios that might involve Tokyo’s military, but Beijing continues to demand a retraction. On Saturday, a Japanese official rejected China’s claims that Takaichi has altered Japan’s position on a Taiwan crisis as “entirely baseless.”

The spat is adding to risks in Japanese markets, which are already under pressure from Takaichi’s plans to boost government spending and a selloff in technology stocks. Verbal sparring may increase choppiness in the yen at a time when Japanese officials have increased warnings to traders over sharp moves. Defense-related stocks are likely to come into renewed focus and may benefit when trading resumes on Tuesday, following a tumultuous week that saw about $127 billion wiped off the value of Tokyo-listed stocks.

“Today, Japan faces the most severe and complex security environment since the end of World War II,” Koizumi said. “To protect the peaceful livelihoods of the Japanese people — including everyone here on Yonaguni — we must strengthen the Self-Defense Forces’ capabilities.”

Yonaguni is the end point of the Ryukyu island chain that stretches several hundred miles from the Japanese mainland. As tensions with China intensified in recent days, Chinese state-controlled media have published articles questioning Japan’s sovereignty over the islands and highlighting how the Ryukyu Kingdom was independent from Japan several hundred years ago.

In recent weeks, the US military held a training exercise to bring supplies from Okinawa to Yonaguni to simulate the creation of a forward-operating base that might be needed in any regional crisis.

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