Tokyo

The Greeting and the Map

On Monday, at the Akasaka Palace state guesthouse, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi met Vietnam’s President To Lam and did what serious neighbors do when the weather to the west turns rough: they made plans. According to the Associated Press, the two leaders pledged deeper cooperation in defense, energy and economic security amid China’s growing regional influence. Takaichi said Japan would accelerate planned security assistance to Vietnam in support of Hanoi’s peacekeeping role. Both sides agreed to maintain a rules-based, “free and open” Indo-Pacific. They signed agreements covering nuclear energy, gas-fired power, semiconductors and artificial intelligence.

The Japan Times, citing Bloomberg, reported ten deals and a pledge to lift bilateral trade toward $100 billion by 2030, during the first visit by a Vietnamese Communist Party chief in eleven years. Vietnam has overlapping claims with Beijing in the South China Sea. China, for its part, has stepped up military activity near Japan’s coasts, and Chinese coast guard ships keep a presence around the uninhabited islands Japan administers in the East China Sea—islands Beijing also claims.

A Handshake Is Not a Strategy

While Tokyo was entertaining Hanoi, Japanese officials were also trying to arrange something smaller and, in its way, more revealing. The Japan Times reported Monday that Tokyo is working to ensure President Xi Jinping does not snub Takaichi at the APEC leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen on Nov. 18–19—their first encounter since a furor over Taiwan drove ties to one of their lowest points since diplomatic normalization in 1972. Officials want at least a customary handshake, the paper said, and will protest any unusual treatment.

The insult, if it comes, would not be about etiquette. It would be about a sentence. In November 2025, Takaichi told the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives that a Taiwan contingency “could constitute” a survival-threatening situation for Japan, in which Tokyo may exercise collective self-defense. Jiji Press, carried this week by Nippon.com, notes that Beijing demanded a withdrawal of the remarks, tightened rare-earth export restrictions, and discouraged Chinese travel to Japan. Takaichi has not withdrawn the words. On Friday she repeated that China is an important neighbor and that Japan will seek a constructive, stable relationship—without unsaying what she said about Taiwan.

What America Should Hear in It

Lucid’s opinion is this: a republic that treats an ally’s plain speech about its own survival as a diplomatic inconvenience has already begun to bargain with reality. Japan is not asking Washington to romanticize Asia. It is doing the ordinary work of a free country in a hard neighborhood—tightening ties with Vietnam, stating that Taiwan is not a parlor game, and refusing to buy a handshake with a retraction. The United States has an interest in that stubbornness. Alliances are not tourism. They are the habit of standing where the map actually is.

If Xi withholds the greeting, the cameras will call it a snub. The more important picture will be the one taken in Tokyo this week: two countries, not waiting for permission, writing down what they intend to build.

References

• Asahi Shimbun / AP: Japan and Vietnam pledge deeper cooperation amid China’s influence
• The Japan Times: Japan and Vietnam agree to boost economic security and energy ties
• The Japan Times: Japan works to shield Takaichi from any Xi snub at China summit
• Nippon.com / Jiji: Hopes fading for an early Japan-China summit

Photo by Basile Morin via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped and color-adjusted.