Japan and Australia are cosying up to each other

WHEN ABE SHINZO visited Australia in 2014, he became the first Japanese leader to address its parliament. Relations between the two countries have since blossomed. In 2018 Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s then-prime minister, posted a celebratory selfie of himself with Mr Abe and their wives after salvaging the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a big trade deal that America had ditched. Before the pandemic, Aussie tourists flocked to Japanese ski resorts. Japan was the first country that Scott Morrison, the current Australian leader, visited after the pandemic started. On January 6th Mr Morrison and Japan’s new prime minister, Kishida Fumio, held a virtual summit to sign a long-awaited treaty to improve security co-operation.

China has done much to push the two together. When territorial disputes between Japan and China flared up in 2005, Australia saw it as “a bilateral problem, and we didn’t want to be drawn into that problem”, says Bruce Miller, a former Australian ambassador to Japan. And when Otsuka Taku, a Japanese lawmaker from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, made his first official visit to Australia in 2013, he recalls being “shocked” at the extent of Chinese influence among his Australian peers. Since then, the situation has “drastically changed”, says Mr Otsuka. These days, Australia shares many of Japan’s insecurities about Chinese expansionism. It has also experienced China’s economic coercion in the wake of its call for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic.