From Tokyo to Manila, Asian neighbours move to counter China

While the world's attention has been consumed by the West Asia conflict, a quieter but no less consequential contest has been playing out in Asia's own backyard.

The tussle between China and its neighbours has been grinding forward for years, finding a different shape each time it surfaces. This past week produced three fresh manifestations.

Japan announced a plan to field thousands of kamikaze drones and low-cost missiles capable of flying more than 1,000 kilometres. The Philippines quietly signed an executive order renaming over a hundred disputed features in the Spratlys. A Chinese naval fleet, meanwhile, entered the Sea of Japan at the very moment Tokyo was finishing the deployment of its new long-range missile systems.

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None of this emerged from nowhere. Each of the events is significant on its own. But when you take them together, they form the portrait of a region in which the pressure, and the responses to it, keep intensifying.

Japan's new doctrine

Tokyo's plan is ambitious: a force exceeding a thousand kamikaze drones. Cheap, one-way munitions designed to hunt, track, and destroy—backed by long-range missiles that can cover more than 1,000 kilometres from Japan's home islands. Shanghai sits within that range. So does Taiwan.

Japan is prioritising mass and saturation over a few high-end, expensive platforms—a strategy proven effective by the Ukraine war and Iran’s asymmetric resilience in West Asia.

A single cruise missile can cost upwards of $1 million. A capable kamikaze drone, by contrast, costs approximately $35,000. For the price of one cruise missile, Japan could field roughly 28 to 30 drones. Such drones can overwhelm an adversary's air defences through sheer volume. They degrade radar systems and deplete interceptor stockpiles before conventional precision munitions are even launched.

This is the "integrated attack" doctrine taking shape in Japanese defence planning: first, swarms of cheap drones to saturate and degrade; then missiles against high-value targets. Incorporate drones launched from submarines, surface drones, and other submerged platforms—all of this is part of the expanded plan, and the attack vectors multiply to a point where any coherent defensive response becomes genuinely difficult to mount.

This shift is inseparable from what Japan has already put into practice. The Japan Ground Self-Defence Force this week completed the deployment of its Type 25 long-range surface-to-ship guided missiles and hypervelocity gliding projectiles (HGP), the country's first hypersonic weapon system. Japan also intends to fit its surface ship fleet with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

And this is an ongoing process being pursued at speed. SIPRI data shows Japan's defence budget grew by more than 40 per cent between 2020 and 2024, reaching $58 billion while overtaking South Korea. No other major US ally in the region comes close to that rate of increase. Tokyo is making itself clear: the strategic ambiguity it has stuck to for decades has become a luxury it can no longer afford.

And Beijing's response has been indignant. Chinese defence ministry spokespeople have labelled Japan's deployments an expression of "neo-militarism" and warned that offensive weapons deployed under the guise of a "defensive counterstrike" capability exceed the limits of self-defence. The language is pointed. It is also, notably, doing nothing to reverse Tokyo's decision.

Manila's sovereignty gambit

On the other side of the South China Sea, the Philippines has chosen a different instrument, but it is also sending the same message. Under an executive order signed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, more than 100 features in the Kalayaan Island Group, the Filipino designation for the Spratly archipelago, will be assigned official Philippine names. Government agencies, schools, and public institutions have been directed to begin using the new nomenclature immediately, embedding it in the country's administrative and educational fabric before Beijing has any practical means to resist.

Renaming is not a military act. It generates no exchange of fire, no flashpoint, no immediate crisis that either side must manage. And yet it feels like something crawling under the skin, a permanent act of sovereign assertion against a neighbour so huge.

Once a name is embedded in official maps, government registers, and school textbooks, no diplomatic protest can extract it. Manila has done this before. In 2012, the Aquino administration unilaterally renamed the waters along the Philippine coast the West Philippine Sea—and that name has stuck, domestically and increasingly beyond.

China claims the South China Sea in almost its entirety, which has been rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016. Manila is now using that ruling as a launching pad. By formalising Filipino names for Spratly features that have been the scene of repeated confrontations between Philippine and Chinese coast guard and naval vessels, the Marcos government is asserting administrative sovereignty over contested geography. It is a slow, cumulative sovereignty-building exercise that is exceptionally difficult to reverse and creates a baseline for every future negotiation.

Beijing's objections have obviously followed swiftly and in the familiar register: the renaming constitutes an infringement of Chinese sovereignty, and China reserves the right to take "necessary measures". What those measures are, or will be, remains notably vague. What is not vague is Manila's trajectory. The Philippines has been hardening its position in the South China Sea across multiple fronts. The resupply missions to the grounded BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal, and this latest administrative assertion. Every step is calibrated to avoid direct military confrontation while incrementally strengthening the Philippine position on the ground.

The Taiwan variable

Then there is the Chinese naval transit that perhaps shows where the region now stands.

Five PLA Navy vessels moved through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan as Japan was completing its Type 25 missile deployment, and they were tracked heading northeast. Whether the timing was coordinated in Beijing or coincidental matters less than what the transit communicated: that China can operate in waters Japan considers its own near-maritime environment. Tokyo sends missiles toward the mainland; Beijing sends ships toward Japan's coastline. That is the exchange rate of the current moment.

To understand the full weight of Japan's rearmament, there is also the Taiwan question. Geography explains much of Japan's urgency. The Nansei island chain runs to within 140 kilometres of Taiwan's northern coast. A China that controlled Taiwan would no longer be a distant pressure on Japan, but it would be positioned directly across Japan's maritime approaches, threatening trade routes and casting serious doubt over the practical value of the US-Japan alliance in a crisis.

The policy shift due to this has been clear as day. In November 2025, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told the Japanese parliament that a Chinese military assault on Taiwan could constitute a "survival-threatening situation" for Japan, the specific legal threshold under Japan's 2015 security legislation that permits the Self-Defence Forces to engage. The statement was not made for showmanship; it reflected a line of political thinking that has been building for years. After leaving office, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had stated that a Taiwan contingency was simultaneously a Japanese contingency and a contingency for the US-Japan alliance. Former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's repeated formulation, "Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow," was widely understood as a coded reference to Taiwan.

Beijing's reaction to Takaichi's remarks was furious. What followed was revealing not for its anger, which was predictable, but for its precise nature. Chinese state media drew direct comparisons to Japan's wartime conduct. Editorials questioned sovereignty over Okinawa. Export controls on rare earth materials and dual-use goods were imposed.

A government willing to reach for rare earth leverage in response to a parliamentary statement is telling you plainly that it considers Japan's Taiwan posture a genuine strategic threat, not a diplomatic inconvenience. But why? Where did the reaction come from?

The urgency can be understood by a specific timeline that has been doing the rounds. Many assessments point out that 2027 is the year by which China aims to have acquired the military capacity to launch a credible cross-strait invasion.

Japan's own National Defence Strategy has set targets of 2027 for the SDF to take primary responsibility for repelling an invasion with allied support, and 2032 for the capability to defeat threats "at a further distance". The drone fleets and missile deployments being announced now are timed responses to a specific window that Tokyo's planners believe they must close before it opens.

Japan reached its 2 per cent of GDP defence spending target a full year ahead of schedule. Military expenditure for fiscal year 2025 came to roughly $69.9 billion—a figure made possible by the LDP's supermajority win in the 2026 general election, which handed Takaichi's rearmament agenda a clear mandate. The next five-year defence programme is already in preparation, and the expectation in Tokyo and Washington is that the ceiling will move again.

Ukraine, Iran, and the lessons

Russia's war in Ukraine has shown that territorial ambiguity does not protect a smaller state when a larger neighbour decides to move. It also illustrated the operational value of cheap, mass-produced strike systems, drones, loitering munitions, and saturation tactics against expensive, sophisticated military hardware. Japan's kamikaze drone doctrine is, in part, a direct application of what the war in Ukraine proved in the field.

Iran added its own lesson to the regional calculus: that a posture built on ambiguity and isolation offers no reliable protection when a determined adversary decides the moment has arrived. That, combined with the situation in Ukraine, has pushed governments across Asia to make decisions that would have been politically inconceivable half a decade ago.

The spending data captures the mood. The Asia-Oceania region allocated $629 billion to defence in 2024—up 6.3 per cent from 2023. Taiwan's budget grew 11 per cent in 2023 alone. China's official figure rose more than 20 per cent between 2020 and 2024 to around $320 billion, though analysts who account for opaque accounting put the real number nearer $471 billion. China still outspends India, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines combined. The gap in raw numbers remains wide. The gap in intent has closed considerably.

What comes next

None of this means that an armed conflict is imminent. The region's leaders are managing risk carefully, and the architecture of deterrence is, in part, designed to prevent the very escalation it prepares for. What it does mean is that the era of asymmetric restraint is eroding, and has been for some time.

Japan has chosen quantity and range, with Taiwan's fate as the explicit horizon of its planning. The Philippines has chosen cartographic change and administrative permanence, turning an international legal ruling into a fact on the ground. Both have read the same strategic environment and arrived at responses that, by design, are difficult to reverse. Beijing's protests have grown louder. Its ability to alter the underlying trajectory appears to be shrinking.

The Taiwan question sits at the centre of this entire architecture. It is the reason Japan is rearming at pace. It is part of the reason the Philippines is hardening its positions in the South China Sea, because it understands that a region that tolerates coercion in one corner invites it in another. And it is the factor that makes the current moment, to strategists across the region, feel less like a moment of tension management and more like a pre-crisis settling of accounts.

The tussle goes on. It will find another form soon enough.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)