Why Japan has been a post-Brexit ally to Britain

Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida is in London today to meet Rishi Sunak and sign an historic defence agreement which will allow the countries to deploy forces on each other’s soil. The two will also toast the new UK-Japan digital partnership which aims to ‘strengthen cooperation across cyber resilience, online safety and semiconductors’ and discuss trade including the UK’s accession to the CPTPP (Comprehensive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). This all sounds great, but behind the official theatre, what is the substance of the upgraded relationship?

The defence agreement is being trumpeted by the government as ‘the most significant between the two countries in more than a century.’ This references the Anglo-Japanese alliance signed in 1902 by Lord Lansdowne which ended Britain’s period of ‘splendid isolation’ (no alliances) and marked a significant step in Japan’s emergence as a serious world power. It worked reasonably well for a couple of decades and was the ‘special relationship’ that might have been had not Britain bankrupted and exhausted itself in World War I.