During a parliamentary session on Nov. 7, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi responded to budget committee lawmakers’ questions about Japanese military posture in the event of a China-Taiwan conflict with the expected rhetoric past leaders had used.
Then she was pressed on whether such a conflict would constitute a “survival threatening situation”—a trigger term for military action under a defense statute enacted in 2015 by her mentor, the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
