The rise of China and Japan's balancing strategy: critical junctures and policy shifts in the 2010s

This article argues that as opposed to the conventional wisdom of Japan's hedging policy, Japan has been constantly taking balancing behavior vis-a-vis China since the end of the Cold War; however, the incremental shift to explicit balancing began after the 2010 Senkaku Boat Collision Incident. The shift was accelerated by the 2012 Japanese Government Purchase of the Senkaku Islands. Since then, Japan has attempted to engage in both internal and external balancing by taking more security burden-sharing with the United States through the relaxation of Japan's constitutional and political constraints on its military capabilities and the enhancement of security linkages with other regional states, such as Australia and India.