TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 24 May 2026In November 1940, the British Royal Navy launched a daring carrier strike against the Italian fleet at Taranto. The attack shocked the world, crippled Italian naval power in the Mediterranean, and demonstrated just how devastating naval air power could be against battleships at anchor. But the consequences of Taranto didn’t end in Italy.
In this episode, we explore the aftermath of the raid, the race to understand how it had been achieved, and why military observers around the world paid such close attention to what happened there. From British convoy operations in the Mediterranean to Japanese investigations into shallow-water torpedo attacks, this episode examines how one raid would echo far beyond the harbor at Taranto.
How did the British make the attack possible? What lessons did foreign observers take away from it? And why did some nations react to the raid very differently than others?
May 25, 2026
Did The Taranto Raid Inspire Pearl Harbor?
May 18, 2026
Isoroku Yamamoto – the admiral and the postwar legend
Big Serge examines the popular memory of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s early naval war successes against the United States from 1941 onwards, contrasting the postwar image with the man himself:
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.
Photo from the National Diet Library via Wikimedia Commons.
Japanese leadership in the Second World War enjoys noticeably lower name recognition than their German counterparts. Most people with a cursory knowledge of the war know the core German leadership group around Hitler — Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and perhaps Heydrich and Bormann — and the all-star lineup of German generals like Rommel, Manstein, and Guderian. In contrast, the only particularly notorious member of Japan’s nebulous leadership group is General Hideki Tojo, who served as Prime Minister for most of the war and became the centerpiece defendant in the postwar trial. As far as Japanese commanders go, the list of name-brand personnel has but a single entry: Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto’s life and career present a fascinating trajectory that shapes a particular, sympathetic view of the man. A veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he spent much of his 30’s in the United States, studying at Harvard and serving as naval attache in Japan’s Washington embassy. He therefore had a first hand understanding of America’s industrial depth, and was famously pessimistic about Japan’s prospects in a a war against the United States. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas”, he argued, “knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America”. In one of his more famous and widely recited (though often badly translated) remarks about a war with the United States, he told Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in September 1940:
If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe the Navy going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.
This quote certainly seems remarkably prescient, in light of Japan’s initial wave of operational successes, which slowly faded away as American combat power ramped up. Far more famous still is his remark, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that Japan had “awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with terrible resolve”.
All of this shapes the perception of Yamamoto as a quasi-tragic figure who understood that Japan was unlikely to defeat the United States in the Pacific War, counseled against the conflict, and then dutifully tried to play a losing hand as well as he could once war had been thrust upon him against his own advice. Yamamoto was furthermore a critic of the Japanese Army’s war in China and a particularly vocal opponent of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan, lending credence to the idea that he was war-averse.
This is the Yamamoto of American popular memory, and indeed of a great deal of Japanese postwar writing: a sort of samurai Cassandra, too perceptive and cosmopolitan for the militarist regime he served, a man who fired the opening shot of the Pacific War with a heavy heart and no illusions.
It is certainly true that Yamamoto had an appropriately pessimistic assessment of Japan’s prospects in an extended conflict with the United States. What is less often appreciated is that Yamamoto did not, on the basis of this assessment, conclude that Japan ought not to fight. He concluded instead that, if Japan was going to fight, it had to fight differently — with greater boldness, more risk, and an aggressive search for a decisive stroke. He did not spend the eighteen months before Pearl Harbor advocating for peace. He spent them designing what was, on balance, the single most aggressive operational scheme that was possible — and then only barely — within Japan’s kinetic parameters.
This is the critical distinction between Yamamoto-the-man and the Yamamoto of postwar hagiography. He was not a pacifist, reluctant or otherwise. He was a Japanese naval officer of strong patriotic conviction, deeply committed to his service and his nation, who happened to understand the arithmetic of industrial war better than most of his colleagues. Notwithstanding his appreciation for America’s vast industrial base, he shared a broader Japanese disdain for American martial proclivities, dismissing American naval officers as a club of “golfers and bridge players”. His understanding of the United States did not produce pacifism. It produced, rather, a particular kind of operational philosophy — one which held that Japan’s best hope in a war with the United States was to front-load its risk-taking, to achieve a string of dramatic early victories that would either compel American negotiation or, failing that, push the eventual American counter-offensive as far into the future as possible. In either case, the operational prescription was the same: bold, high-risk operations aimed at decisive results.
March 31, 2026
Japan’s navy … uh, I mean the “Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force”
On Substack, Francis Turner discusses what serious countries do (so you know the topic isn’t anything to do with Canada), and part of the post is about the Japanese Navy Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and its latest ship building program:
Last month Japan started work on its second ASEV (Aegis System Equipped Vessel), which should probably classed a Guided Missile Cruiser, though it is unclear if the C designation will be used (let’s face it Japan still calls its two “not really aircraft carriers, honest guv” aircraft carrying warships “Helicopter Destroyers”. Though apparently it plans to change that soon).
At 190m long and 25m broad, the ASEVs will be some of the largest non-aircraft carrier ships being built by anyone this century1 until the Trump battleships start construction. The Trump battleships are projected to be about 50% larger but they haven’t yet been funded let alone contracted. The USN’s Zumwalts are roughly the same size.
It isn’t just the size that is impressive, it is also the speed of construction. The ASEV as a concept showed up in ~2020 when Japan decided the land based Aegis Ashore program was a failure and cancelled it. In October 2024, after about four years, plans had been made, budget allocated and contracts awarded for the two ships. Construction of the first started last July (2025) and the second last month (February 2026). Construction time is estimated to be around three years, with the first delivered/commissioned in March 2028 and the second one year later. Why one year later and not six months earlier? My guess is that the reason is to incorporate lessons learned from sea trials and operating the first in the final construction stages of the second. This seems similar to the Izumo/Kaga construction a decade ago.
Put together and you have ships that will have gone from concept to contract award in 4 years and contract award to fully-functioning delivery in under 5 years — assuming there are no delays. That seems plausible, the Izumo and Kaga were built in about the same time frame, and stands in stark contrast to the procurement speed of the US Navy and any European navy. The first Zumwalt, for example took over 5 years to go from concept to start of construction and another 5+ from there to commissioning and then another 4 to full acceptance. The ASEVs are also expected to be a lot cheaper, costing around JPY400B or about US$2.5 billion for the initial version. There will undoubtedly be upgrades — e.g. drone defenses, laser or rail guns — and there are some new features compared to previous ships — the SPY7 radar from Lockheed Martin for example — but this is an evolution of existing Japanese and US Aegis destroyers rather than a brand new concept which helps explain why I am confident about the timeline and budget.
Although the ASEV’s primary role is missile defense, there is no reason why one might not, in the fullness of time, be loaded with offensive missiles such as the TLAM or antiship missiles. Indeed the Naval News article lists both as options:
Each vessel will feature a 128-cell Vertical Launch System (VLS) — significantly more than the 96 cells installed on Japan’s latest Aegis destroyers.
The VLS will be capable of launching:
– SM-3 Block IIA interceptors, jointly developed by Japan and the United States for ballistic missile defense
– SM-6 missiles, capable of engaging advanced aerial threats, including hypersonic glide vehicles
The ships will also support Japan’s emerging counterstrike capability.
Planned armament includes:
– the extended-range Type 12 anti-ship missile (ship-launched improved variant)
– the U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missile
Is that TLAM in your launcher or are you pleased to see me?
Notably the Tomahawk capability has already been fitted to one of the Aegis destroyers this class is supposed to replace. A 128 cell ASEV firing TLAMs could be very unpleasant for Little Rocket Man; if it fired antiship missiles that could make a Chicom invasion of Taiwan pretty miserable just on its own. It would also make a phenomenal commerce raider / blockade enforcer if such roles were needed.
[Aside: Unlike some country’s missiles I’d be pretty confident that the Type 12 anti-ship missile will work well]
As CDR Salamander observed on X, the real question is why Japan doesn’t make a few more and sell them to countries/navies that struggle with procurement. And for that matter why it doesn’t make a couple more for itself. Perhaps it will. I figure there’s a couple of years before there will be yard space to build them so there’s no hurry to make that decision.
Russia’s Kirov class battlecruisers are larger but a) they were built in the 1970s/80s and b) only one is currently active (for some definition of active).
Japan’s decision to rebuild naval strength has been noted by others, too:
This Recipe Took 3 Years … Ninja Kikatsugan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Sept 2025Very bitter, very sake-flavored balls that include ginseng, coix seeds, and licorice
City/Region: Japan
Time Period: 1676Much like cowboys, pirates, and knights, ninja have been fictionalized to be a far cry from the intelligence gathering and sabotage experts of history. The term “ninja” didn’t even become popular until the mid-20th century.
Even the historical text I’m using here, the Bansenshukai, has been called into question. Because it was written over the period of several centuries, often by people who weren’t even alive during the period when ninja, or shinobi, were active, who knows if it’s an accurate portrayal of their tools and methods.
If this recipe is accurate, I feel bad for the people who had to eat them. They’re really bitter with an overwhelming sake flavor that isn’t pleasant. Really, I wouldn’t recommend making these; they’re not worth the 3 year time investment, and hyōrōgan are a much tastier ninja survival food.
Kikatsugan
10 ryō Asiatic ginseng
20 ryō Buckweat flour
20 ryō Millet Flour
20 ryō Yam
1 ryō Liquorice
10 ryō Coix seed
20 ryō Rice flour
Grind this into a powder, soak it in three shō of sake for three years until it has dried. Afterward, roll it into balls the size of peach pits.
Eating three of these daily will keep you healthy even when you have nothing else to eat.
Eating three will prevent both mental and physical fatigue.— Bansenshukai, 1676
February 21, 2026
The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Based on the few books of his I’d heard of, I wouldn’t have expected Malcolm Gladwell to dip into military history … and from what Secretary of Defense Rock says, it might have been better if Gladwell had steered clear of this particular topic anyway:
I recently received The Bomber Mafia as a gift for my birthday, and it was bad, so bad that I felt compelled to write this review. In so many ways, the book is everything that is wrong with the “pop history” genre: a bestselling author with a massive built-in audience, with a hit podcast to cross-promote the material, and a framing promise to reveal a supposedly “great untold story” about the strategic and moral struggles of American airmen in World War II. The problem in this case is that Gladwell’s narrative about Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansell, and the evolution of strategic bombing repeatedly collides with the existing scholarship and often ignores it altogether. From his treatment of the raids of Münster and Schweinfurt–Regensburg to his use of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and his confident claims about what compelled Japan to surrender, The Bomber Mafia exemplifies the worst tendencies of popular history: sweeping pronouncements built on selective reading, caricatured context, and a startling indifference to both primary sources and a vast secondary literature.1
I was only vaguely familiar with Malcolm Gladwell and his work, but for those who don’t know (like me until recently), he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, has written a bunch of New York Times bestselling books on sociology, psychology, and economics, and also hosts a very popular podcast called Revisionist History.2 This is all to say he is widely known and already has a big audience that is generally receptive to his projects. The book was originally based on four episodes he did on this topic in July 2020, and then turned into print, so it isn’t so much an actual book as it is a printed podcast.3
Unsurprisingly, both the audiobook and print editions were widely acclaimed upon release. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the book as “a wonderful book”.4 The journalist Michael Lewis described it as “a riveting tale”, while the bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson called it “a wonderful narrative”.5 The book was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It also enjoyed significant commercial success, reaching number two on The New York Times Best Sellers list.6 To promote the book, Gladwell made appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning show. MSNBC even stated in the segment title that this is “A great untold story”, which is hilarious, given that I don’t know how much ink has been spilled on the strategic bombing campaigns.7
But it should be noted that the book has been criticized by virtually anyone who has seriously studied this topic. Much of the criticism of the book has come from the fact that it hardly focuses on the Japanese and German perspectives, misinterprets why members of the air tactical school focused on precision bombing, and the actual role strategic bombing played in the surrender of Japan.8 All of that is valid, but what was initially more startling to me was how little use was made of primary or secondary sources. So many important works are left out makes me wonder how much research Gladwell even put in.9 To write about strategic bombing in World War II and not include Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power, Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air, Ken Werrell’s Blankets of Fire or Death From the Heavens, Geoffrey Perrett’s Winged Victory, and barely using any of the official histories is borderline negligence.10 Anyone doing research on strategic bombing and Air Power in World War II almost certainly would have come across these.
- Popular history is a form of historical writing aimed at broad audiences that usually prioritizes storytelling over real scholarship. See Gerald Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” Past & Present, no. 132 (1991): 130–49, and more recently, Ben Alpers, “The Promise and Perils of Popular History,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, August 17, 2021.
- The show itself isn’t really a conversation with experts and historians (though they do appear) so much as storytelling.
- I would also preface that I generally don’t have a problem with this premise. There is definitely a segment of the historical profession that dislikes pop history for reasons tied as much to credentials as to content. Much “popular history” is produced by journalists, independent writers, or commentators rather than credentialed academic historians, and that fact alone generates suspicion. In some cases, this skepticism is warranted: weak sourcing, thin engagement with the scholarship, and overconfident claims do real damage. But the problem is not who writes history so much as how it is written. Plenty of non-historians have produced outstanding historical works by taking the craft seriously — immersing themselves in primary sources, engaging honestly with existing scholarship, and resisting the temptation to oversimplify for the sake of narrative punch. Conversely, academic credentials have never been a guarantee for insight or even accuracy. If a writer does the work, respects the evidence, and treats complexity as something to be explained rather than avoided, there is no real reason to dismiss the result simply because of the writer’s background.
- Paul Kennedy, “The Bomber Mafia’ Review: Architects of a Firestorm”, The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021.
- Summary of reviews in paperback.
- “Hardcover Nonfiction – May 16, 2021”. The New York Times.
- Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Bomber Mafia’ Looks At A Great Untold Story From WWII.
- Some critical reviews include David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2021; Saul David, “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia is misleading history-lite”, The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2021, and Steve Agoratus, Air & Space Power History 68, no. 4 (2021): 52–53.
- This is also coming from a guy who famously wrote that achieving world-class expertise in any field is, to a large extent, a function of accumulating roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, as described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
- Gladwell doesn’t really deal with British strategic bombing; there’s just a brief chapter on Arthur Harris. If interested, see Noble Frankland, Bomber Offensive, the Devastation of Europe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45 (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1979), and Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
February 18, 2026
Battle of Manila, 1945
Real Time History
Published 3 Oct 2025The Battle of Manila 1945 was the only urban battle in the American Pacific War comparable with Stalingrad, Berlin or other European battles. In gruelling weeks of fighting the 6th Army fought in house-to-house combat against entrenched Japanese.
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February 17, 2026
Eating in Japan During World War 2
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Aug 2025Fried sweet potato paste on top of roasted seaweed with a soy glaze and brown rice
City/Region: Japan
Time Period: December 1942Contrary to the government’s promises, the availability of food declined in Japan as World War 2 went on. Journal entries from 1945 highlight just how bad things had gotten. People were unable to get ahold of staples like rice, soy sauce, miso, and fuel for cooking fires, and many were scavenging for anything to eat.
This recipe comes from a few years earlier when things were tight, but not quite so dire. While it doesn’t exactly taste like grilled eel, it is quite good. There’s a nice crispiness to it (more so before the glazing and grilling), and the glaze is delicious. It kind of reminds me of the breading that you might get on some katsu.
Kabayaki of Sweet Potato
Ingredients for 5 servings
100 monme sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
15 sheets of roasted seaweed
Grate the sweet potatoes with a grater and grind. Mix in the flour and salt. Spread the mixture onto the roasted nori to a thickness of about 1/2 cm. Fry them in oil until golden brown. Separately, make a soy sauce glaze in the ratio of 3 parts soy sauce to 2 parts sugar. Dip in the glaze and grill them. Repeat this twice, brushing with sauce each time. On the third, use only the sauce without grilling.— Fujin no Tomo (The Woman’s Friend), December 1942
February 2, 2026
The Biggest Naval Battle in History: Leyte Gulf 1944
Real Time History
Published 5 Sept 2025In Fall 1944, Japan is set on stopping the US from re-capturing the Philippines, a vital trade route between the Japanese home islands and the resource-rich occupied territories to the south. With a complex plan they want to strike the US Navy as it’s landing on Leyte island. The resulting series of battles is today known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle in history.
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January 30, 2026
Japanese Last-Ditch Pole Spear Bayonet
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Sept 2025Japanese bayonets followed the same trend of simplification as Arisaka rifles towards the end of World War Two, culminating in what is today called the “pole bayonet”. Abandoning even the fittings to mount to a rifle, these bayonets were intended to be lashed to a pole to create a spear. The Japanese government did not have the military forces to repulse an American invasion of the home islands, and was actively planning to sacrifice millions of Japanese civilians in a hopeless defense, literally having them charge American machine guns with spears. Some of this was done on outer island battles, like Saipan and Okinawa but the scale in Japan itself would have been unimaginable. It was the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to a Japanese surrender and prevented this from becoming a reality.
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December 14, 2025
Hitler becomes a German – Rise of Hitler 23, January-March 1932
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2025The big news this winter is the German Presidential elections, held now in March for the first time since 1932, which pit current President Paul von Hindenburg against Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. Hitler, though, must become a German citizen before he can run; he been stateless since he gave up his Austrian citizenship seven years ago. The campaigns are quite different, but both effective, and the German people head for the polls.
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December 12, 2025
Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world
CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:
I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.
I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.
I don’t think that is all that helpful.
Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kidō Butai comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.
To the lay eye — or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons — a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.
No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.
[Click to embiggenate]
For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.
Today’s greatest bone of contention — not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above — is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.
If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.
For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.
They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.
Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.
Update, 13 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 6, 2025
Battle of Tarawa, 1943
Real Time History
Published 5 Dec 2025The Marine and US Army landing on the Tarawa Atoll’s Betio and Makin islands were the first operations in the new Central Pacific front of the Pacific War. Tarawa was one of the deadliest amphibious landings for the Marine Corps which hadn’t yet perfected such complex operations. But the lessons learned at Tarawa would already be applied a few months later at Kwajalein and Eniwetok.
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December 3, 2025
Battle of Peleliu 1944
Real Time History
Published 18 Jul 2025In September 1944, the US 1st Marine Division is on its way to another amphibious invasion in the Pacific – the tiny island of Peleliu. For almost half the Marines it will be their baptism of fire against veteran Japanese troops with a new defensive doctrine. Some American commanders call for the operation to be cancelled, but it goes ahead. By its end, half the Marines and all the Japanese will be killed or wounded – but was Peleliu worth it?
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November 21, 2025
The “spat” between China and Japan is far more important than western media are reporting
Claire Berlinsky explains why we should be paying far more attention to what our media are treating as a minor diplomatic spat as Beijing reacts furiously to the new Japanese PM’s comments:
You need to see the Chinese media today to get a feel for this. Front pages of the relevant organs are devoted to frothing in fury at Japan. They’re rectifying bad thoughts like a house on fire.
Here’s why I’m worried by this. Both the Chinese- and Japanese-language press are treating this as a major diplomatic incident. (In English, it’s mostly being described as “a row” or “spat” — then back to Trump and Epstein.) Let me walk you through what it looks from Beijing and Tokyo, with help from ChatGPT on the translations.
The trigger was a comment in by the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She told a parliamentary committee that a Taiwan contingency involving the use of force might constitute a “sonritsu kiki jitai” (a “survival-threatening situation” — I think we’d use the phrase “existential threat”) for Japan under its 2015 security laws, and justify the exercise of collective self-defense, using Japan’s self-defense forces.
Beijing exploded. China summoned the Japanese ambassador in Beijing for a formal démarche, and it allowed the PRC consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, to post a (now-deleted) tweet calling for her decapitation—”that dirty head that trespassed should be cut off, are you ready?” The Xue Jian post has, of course, become a media event of its own. Beijing issued a travel advisory urging Chinese citizens to avoid Japan, and told students to “carefully reconsider” study plans. It stepped up coast-guard activity near the Senkakus, and cancelled the Xi–Takaichi bilateral at the G20.
But this arid account doesn’t begin to convey the way the Chinese and Japanese media are talking about this. The Chinese coverage is nothing short of hysterical. To read the Party-line outlets, you’d think Takaichi had just ordered the immediate re-invasion of Manchuria. Her comment, they said, was an evidence of a “dangerous rightward turn” in Japanese politics. They’re calling it a “sky-collapsing opening“, accusing her of “reckless ranting” and tearing up the China-Japan relationship.
The headline in a widely circulated China Daily article:”If China and Japan go to war, Japan will be destroyed“. They found the inevitable panel of “peace-loving international friends” — including Okinawan peace activists and pro-PRC overseas Chinese — to denounce Takaichi as the reincarnation of “Japanese militarism”. The peace activists dutifully warned that the Japanese people would be “dragged into catastrophe” by their government. A CNR column accuses her of “brazen provocation”, and claims that “Taiwan compatriots are also outraged” at the prospect of Taiwan being turned into a battleground between China and a “militaristic” Japan.
The Party line: Taiwan is a “settled” internal issue; any talk of Japanese collective self-defense in the Strait is aggression and a “serious violation” of the post-1945 order. Takaichi represents “unrepentant militarism.” Chinese pieces quote her opponents at length to argue that “sober Japanese elites” are deploring her recklessness. Chinese-language coverage of the travel advisory is not treating it as a minor consular notice. They’re claiming it’s the first coercive step.
In Japan, this is front-page foreign policy news, not a minor gaffe. Mainichi ran an editorial saying, more or less, that Takaichi’s words were legally consistent with the 2015 security laws, but prime ministers should be more discrete about hypothetical military contingencies and show more prudence. Opposition figures are saying she “went too far” and threw the relationship into “a very grave state”. They called it “frivolous” for a commander-in-chief to talk so specifically about use-of-force scenarios.
On the other hand, there’s clearly a domestic constituency that sees this as long overdue. Some in her party see any hint of retraction as “weakness toward China”, and they’re praising her for drawing a firm line on Taiwan. (The coverage about whether to expel Xue Jian is divided: His post was a death threat, obviously, but the Foreign Ministry seems reluctant to escalate this further.)
TV explainers are reminding viewers that the 2015 security legislation already contemplated a Taiwan contingency — what’s new is that the prime minister has now said this out loud. And a prime minister with an openly revisionist profile — that’s definitely new.
So there’s a lot of signaling going on. Beijing is signaling to its own public: “We’ll never again let Japanese militarism threaten China. The Party is the bulwark against a repeat of the 1930s.” To Tokyo: “We’ll punish any step toward military involvement in the Strait, first with economic coercion — then worse. We are not kidding about this.” To the wider region and Washington: “Japan is a destabilizer — this woman isn’t right in the head. If things go wrong in the Taiwan Strait, blame Tokyo. Remember Pearl Harbor.”
Update, 23 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
October 24, 2025
Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s Thatcher?
In UnHerd, Christopher Harding profiles the new Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, the first female PM who was elected to office on the 21st:
Sanae Takaichi, new Prime Minister of Japan, 21 October, 2025
Photo by the Cabinet Public Affairs Office via Wikimedia Commons.
As a teenager, Sanae Takaichi no doubt riled her parents now and again with her love of motorbikes and heavy metal. Today, poised to become Japan’s first female prime minister at the age of 64, she is polarising a nation. Some credit “Japan’s Iron Lady” with the steely resolve required to tackle the country’s domestic problems and stand up to China. Others lament the apparent fact that to succeed as a woman in Japanese politics you have to adopt the worst instincts of the men, from policies that prop up the patriarchy — men only on the imperial throne, compulsory shared surnames for married couples — to a nativist ultranationalism.
While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.
First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.
One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.
Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.
Update, 26 October:
