I imagine Japanese politicians are primarily concerned about long term economic stability. If US is seen to be an unstable partner, then it makes sense that they would want to start making diplomatic overtures to China now. The media circus is itself a symptom of internal political instability I would argue. The whole thing exudes profound incompetence on the part of the US political class.
A related aspect here is the whole economic/tech war with China that US drumming up. It puts countries like Japan in a very difficult position because they're so dependent on China for trade. For example, something like 40% of Japanese chips go to China. When US announced that they're going to force companies using US tech to stop selling chips to China Micron stock dropped nearly 10%. Going along with that would be economic suicide. What's worse is that this encourages China to just develop their own domestic tech, and once that's done they have no need for imports regardless of what the political situation is going to look like. In fact, they're likely to become a competitor to Japan at that point. And this is just one sector of the economy.
So, I think there's a combination of fear of political instability within the US along with a concern over US geopolitical games having a negative impact on Japan's economy.
I imagine Japanese politicians are primarily concerned about long term economic stability. If US is seen to be an unstable partner, then it makes sense that they would want to start making diplomatic overtures to China now. The media circus is itself a symptom of internal political instability I would argue. The whole thing exudes profound incompetence on the part of the US political class.
A related aspect here is the whole economic/tech war with China that US drumming up. It puts countries like Japan in a very difficult position because they're so dependent on China for trade. For example, something like 40% of Japanese chips go to China. When US announced that they're going to force companies using US tech to stop selling chips to China Micron stock dropped nearly 10%. Going along with that would be economic suicide. What's worse is that this encourages China to just develop their own domestic tech, and once that's done they have no need for imports regardless of what the political situation is going to look like. In fact, they're likely to become a competitor to Japan at that point. And this is just one sector of the economy.
So, I think there's a combination of fear of political instability within the US along with a concern over US geopolitical games having a negative impact on Japan's economy.