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Japan’s defense minister, visiting a military base near Taiwan, said plans to deploy missiles at the post are on track as tensions rise between Tokyo and Beijing over the East Asian island.
“The deployment can help reduce the possibility of an armed attack on our country,” Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters as he concluded his first visit to the base on the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni on Sunday. “The view that this will increase regional tensions is not accurate.”
Japan plans to deploy medium-range surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni, about 110 kilometers east of Taiwan, as part of a broader military buildup on its southern island chain. The move reflects Tokyo’s concerns about China’s growing military power and the potential for conflict over Taiwan.
Those fears have been heightened by controversy over recent comments by Prime Minister Sanae Takachi concerning the self-ruled territory, which Beijing regards as a province that should be brought under its control by force if necessary. Takaichi raised the theoretical possibility on November 7 that Japan might deploy troops along with other countries if China attacked Taiwan, which drew an angry response from Beijing and economic retaliation.
She has since returned to the government’s long-standing policy of not discussing specific scenarios that could involve Tokyo’s military, but Beijing is seeking to reverse it. On Saturday, a Japanese official rejected China’s claims that Takachi had overstepped Japan’s position on the Taiwan crisis as “completely baseless.”
Asked about the potential impact of the Taiwan crisis on Yonaguni, Koizumi said he would not comment on hypothetical scenarios.
Before reaching Yonaguni, Koizumi visited bases on the Ishigaki and Miyako islands. The Ishigaki base is equipped with anti-ship missiles, while Miyako is home to other military facilities, including air surveillance and ammunition storage. Japan and the United States also have major bases on the large island of Okinawa in the east.
A popular tourist destination, including scuba divers, Yonaguni is also home to a surveillance radar facility that scans the nearby sea and airspace, as well as an electronic warfare unit introduced in 2024 that can be used to jam enemy communications and guidance systems.
In recent weeks, the U.S. military held a training exercise to bring supplies from Okinawa to Yonaguni to build a forward-operating base that might be needed in any regional crisis.
When China responded to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022 by launching major military exercises around the island, ballistic missiles landed just south of Yonaguni, providing a clear example of the island’s proximity to any conflict for control of Taiwan.
In a meeting with the mayor of Yonaguni, Koizumi said Japan must increase its deterrence by enhancing its own capabilities and deepening ties with the US military.
“Today, Japan faces the most serious and complex security environment since the end of World War II,” Koizumi said. “To protect the peaceful livelihood of the Japanese people – including all those on Yonaguni – we must strengthen the capabilities of the Self-Defense Forces.”
Yonaguni is the end point of the Ryukyu island chain that extends several hundred miles from the Japanese mainland. As tensions with China have escalated 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.
Some residents of the Ryukyu Islands, also known as Okinawa Prefecture, want independence, but are wary of getting drawn into a regional conflict if military facilities on the islands are targeted.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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