By Ryosuke Hanada*
JAUKUS may yet be possible. I argued in 2023 that Japan couldn’t be added to AUKUS Pillar Two because it lacked legal and regulatory alignment with Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Now, however, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s election victory and planned reforms may bring about the necessary alignment. (From: The Strategist. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute.)
That architecture is now being built.
Takaichi’s landslide election victory in February—securing over two-thirds of lower house seats to achieve the largest single-party majority of the post-war era—has created political conditions that her predecessors, including Shinzo Abe, aspired to but lacked the parliamentary strength to deliver. Her flagship initiatives directly address the barriers I previously identified: a planned anti-espionage law expanding both coverage and penalties, a National Intelligence Agency to centralise Japan’s fragmented counter-intelligence functions, and a sustained push to liberalise conditions on arms exports. Meanwhile, Australia’s selection in August 2025 of the upgraded Mogami-class frigate design for its navy transformed Japan’s defence-industrial credentials from aspiration to demonstrated reality.
Taken together, these developments do not merely update my earlier assessment; they upend it.
My 2023 critique identified two core legal problems. Japan’s Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets capped penalties for leaking classified information at 10 years’ imprisonment, which is severe by Japan’s standards but modest by Australia’s and the US’s (up to life). The act’s coverage was also narrow, omitting possession, concealment and communication offences, while the Unfair Competition Prevention Act required proof of profit motive with no reference to foreign principals. While the details of Takaichi’s planned legislation are yet revealed, it should address both. The recommendations compiled by Takaichi before becoming prime minister called for the introduction of an anti-espionage law ‘on par with those of other countries’.
The national intelligence bureau or agency, which the government plans to establish as early as mid-2026, and the national intelligence strategy to be published this year matter for structural reasons. Japan’s intelligence functions are currently dispersed across at least six agencies with limited coordination, causing sectionalism among different entities. Sufficiently resourced and funded, a centralised body would create a single accountable interlocutor for intelligence-sharing.
The third barrier, protecting universities and research institutions, remains the least resolved. Legal reform does not by itself produce the security culture that Australia’s University Foreign Interference Task Force has worked to build since 2019. AUKUS partners will scrutinise implementation, not just passage.
On the arms-export side, the Mogami deal is the most consequential development. This is Japan’s first major bilateral defence export at scale involving advanced technology transfer. The Ministry of Defense classified it as ‘joint development’, a formulation permitting the export under rules that technically prohibit lethal weapons transfers. As a report from the United States Study Centre in Sydney noted, the modifications that Australia required were largely limited to combat management system translation and regulatory compliance. So Japan’s export barriers were already navigable, and the political will to navigate them is now clearly present.
The deal matters specifically for AUKUS Pillar Two, the section of the partnership focused on technologies other than submarines, because it proves Japanese industrial capacity at the systems level. As Rintaro Inoue has shown, Japan’s Type-12 SSM-ER anti-ship missile, at probably about US$3 million (A$4.25 million) per round, should be competitive against US alternatives. Its range of at least 1,000 km is twice that of the US PrSM Increment 1. Trilateral or quadrilateral with AUKUS missile production cooperation, incorporating Japan’s Type-12 alongside Australia’s Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance enterprise and US co-production frameworks, is now genuinely within reach. The Liberal Democratic Party’s 20 February proposal to liberalise restrictions on lethal arms export would expand the possibility of defence-industrial partnerships significantly.
Altogether, Japan’s moves under Takaichi are qualitatively different from the incremental reforms under Fumio Kishida and Shigeru Ishiba. Arrangements such as AUKUS are best understood as exclusive cooperation for efficient policy implementation in a competitive strategic environment: zero-sum instruments that set high fences against outsiders. The question was always whether Japan could, institutionally and politically, accept those terms.
Takaichi’s willingness to push anti-espionage legislation, centralise intelligence, ease export conditionalities and absorb the political costs of a sharper posture suggests that Japan can. Abe articulated the vision of graduating from the post-war regime; Takaichi may be the first prime minister with the political resources to actually deliver it.
This assessment in early 2026 is almost the opposite of what I offered in late 2023. Then, the barriers were structural and the political will was aspirational. Now, the political will is demonstrated and the remaining barriers are the timely and steady implementation of her political promises in the coming months. Japan is not yet ready for JAUKUS. But it is, for the first time, getting there.
