After months of diplomatic turbulence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is finally embarking on a bilateral visit that matters. It’s not Washington, not Moscow, not Beijing, but Tokyo.
Japan has always been a natural partner for India. It’s a relationship anchored in shared democratic values, economic complementarities, and maritime imperatives. Yet despite this “naturalness”, India-Japan ties have rarely lived up to their potential. This visit, the first by an Indian Prime Minister in seven years, comes at a moment of strategic fluidity: after a heartbreak with the United States, a misconstrued reset with China, and an even more misconstrued rebound with Russia. Against this backdrop, turning to Japan is not only timely but necessary.
The timing itself is deliberate. The visit precedes India’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a grouping increasingly dominated by China, backed by Russia, and including Pakistan, which is ever more entangled in Beijing’s orbit. If India is to remain relevant in this shifting regional balance—and beyond—anchoring its partnership with Japan provides an indispensable counterweight.
Comfort of history trap
The India-Japan story is often told with nostalgia. Conferences, policy papers, and panel discussions frequently dwell on the sentimental—the Azad Hind Fauj, the elephant gifted to Japan, or Rabindranath Tagore’s exchanges with Japanese thinkers. Even in more contemporary discussions, Shinzo Abe’s landmark “Confluence of the Two Seas” speech in 2007 often dominates, credited with inspiring the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific and, eventually, the Quad.
These legacies are important, but excessive reliance on them has created a trap. When a partnership is framed primarily through the lens of “past goodness”, it risks obscuring the urgency of present opportunities. Too much of India-Japan engagement has either been anchored in historical frameworks or subordinated to the Quad, leaving bilateral possibilities underexplored. For a relationship described as “natural”, its underperformance in tangible outcomes is striking.
India and Japan’s partnership has underdelivered because New Delhi has played it too safe.
For one, it has not kept pace with Tokyo’s transformation into a more assertive security actor, leaving defence technology cooperation underexploited and co-development opportunities on the table.
Trade too has been disappointing—stuck around $22 billion despite decades of Japanese investment. Japan’s vast development footprint in South Asia through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has barely been woven into India’s regional playbook.
Most importantly, India still clings to a narrow view of security, ignoring Japan’s sharper recognition that the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific are now inseparably linked. By staying cautious instead of ambitious, India has allowed a “natural partnership” to remain underwhelming, missing the chance to shape the regional order alongside one of its most reliable allies.
Tangible opportunities today
To be sure, there are visible positives with the latest visit. Japan is expected to invest around $68 billion in India’s semiconductor and other tech sectors, part of its strategy to diversify away from China.
For decades, Japan’s overseas development assistance (ODA) was its primary foreign policy tool, compensating for constitutional restrictions on military engagement. India has been the largest ODA recipient, benefitting from infrastructure investments ranging from the Delhi Metro to the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor. Between 2000-2024, Japanese investments in India have reached nearly $43 billion, with the Maruti-Suzuki partnership standing as a symbol of successful collaboration.
But the fundamentals have shifted. ODA-driven partnerships are no longer enough. To capitalise on this “natural partnership”, India must understand Japan’s contemporary transformation and recalibrate its strategies accordingly.
Three pathways forward
First, Japan as a counterbalance to China in the “Global South”. While China aggressively positions itself as leader of the “Global South”, Japan has quietly invested more deeply in these regions. Through the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), Japan has shifted from paternalistic, top-down aid to co-creation, prioritising private-sector partnerships and mutual growth. For India, this offers a natural platform to co-shape developmental narratives in Africa, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region.
India’s own neighbourhood engagement remains fractured. SAARC is dormant, and nearly every South Asian neighbour (except Bhutan) has signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Chinese investments in strategic ports and infrastructure across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Maldives have created a quasi-encirclement. India’s neighbours, while wary of Beijing’s debt traps, continue to welcome its financial largesse—often more readily than they do India’s outreach.
Here, Japan’s credibility matters. Unlike India, Tokyo is perceived by smaller states as a benevolent partner without hegemonic pretensions. Building joint India-Japan working groups for South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region could create sustainable alternatives to China’s dominance. Synergising India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) with Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) framework, especially its pillar on Connectivity in the 2023 iteration, would provide the architecture for such cooperation.
Second, technology, defence, and strategic industries. Semiconductors are the immediate headline. India welcomes Japan’s investments in this critical sector. Taiwan’s TSMC has been hesitant to enter India directly but has invested heavily in Japan, building two plants worth over $20 billion in Kumamoto with support from Japanese firms such as Sony and Toyota. This creates a potential bridge: through Japan’s investments in chips, TSMC could be incentivised to establish a presence in India, enabling integration into global value chains.
Defence cooperation, however, is the area of greatest untapped potential. Past missteps—such as the aborted ShinMaywa US-2 amphibious aircraft deal—may have left unpleasantness, but these are behind us now. More recent agreements, like the co-development of Unified Complex Radio Antenna (UNICORN) masts in 2024, are encouraging. Opportunities abound: small nuclear reactors, advanced naval vessels, and co-production of secondary defence equipment. Japan’s industrial base could align well with India’s existing defence corridors in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, offering prospects for co-export to third markets.
Ambitions like joint sixth-generation fighter development may be premature, but building a functional defence ecosystem with Japan—akin to India’s arrangements with France or the US—is both realistic and necessary.
Finally, trade and economic balance. While Japanese investment has been steady, trade remains unimpressive. Bilateral trade has hovered around $20 billion annually, skewed in Japan’s favour. For the partnership to deepen, trade must expand not just in volume but in quality. Advanced economies, including Japan, are moving toward carbon-adjusted import frameworks. With the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) set to take effect in 2026, Japan is expected to adopt similar standards. Unless India develops meaningful dialogues to improve climate-financing pathways and align its exports with such requirements, it risks losing competitiveness in advanced markets in times to come.
Also Read: Japan is stepping back from NATO, not Indo-Pacific ties—China is watching the cracks closely
Taking a cue from Japan’s transformation
For India to re-imagine its partnership with Japan along the aforementioned lines, it must first grasp Tokyo’s own evolution.
Japan’s geopolitical position is precarious: disputes with China (over the Senkaku islands), Russia (over the Kuriles), and even South Korea underscore its vulnerabilities. The Senkaku dispute is especially fraught, given its linkage to a potential Taiwan contingency. Yet Japan’s China policy remains ambivalent. While wary of Beijing’s assertiveness, factions within its ruling Liberal Democratic Party, such as the Nikai faction, continue to prioritise economic engagement. Even so, Japan has sought to counterbalance China despite these internal limitations.
Next, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reshaped Japan’s strategic outlook. Moscow’s growing reliance on North Korea, in exchange for potential advanced technology transfers, has heightened Tokyo’s anxieties. In response, Japan released a new National Security Strategy (2022) and Defence Strategy (2023), marking a historic shift: for the first time since World War II, Japan has acquired long-range strike capabilities and committed to unprecedented defence spending. Crucially, Japan now views security as indivisible—linking Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres in response to converging threats. Understanding this transformation could position India to fill the gap by exporting co-produced secondary equipment and dual-use technology.
Finally, the merging of theatres has become a strategic imperative for Tokyo. This perspective explains Japan’s coordinated response in linking conventional security with economic imperatives. For instance, Japan’s outreach to Europe has expanded in novel ways, including its participation in the Three Seas Initiative in Central and Eastern Europe—an arena where India is still debating how to activate complex and unviable projects like the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC). For India, aligning with Japan’s proactive linkages could provide practical pathways to connect the Indo-Pacific with the Euro-Atlantic, both economically and strategically. This would complement India’s plans to build strategic gateways into Europe—in Marseilles, Trieste, and Thessaloniki—rather well.
Mainstreaming Japan in India’s strategic thinking
India’s policy discourse often obsesses over the US, China, Russia, or closer home, Pakistan. Japan, by contrast, is treated as a stable constant: too reliable to demand urgent attention. This complacency is a mistake. Tokyo is not merely a “background partner”; it is one of the few genuinely trustworthy actors with both the capacity and the credibility to shape Asia’s future order. At a time of geopolitical flux, with the spectre of “Trumpian disorder” looming over the West and beyond, India cannot afford to underutilise Japan.
Therefore, India’s forthcoming engagement with Japan offers more than symbolism. It comes at the right moment to recalibrate a relationship long described as “natural” but left relatively neglected. By freeing the partnership from the comfort of nostalgia, embracing Japan’s transformation as a security actor, and creating synergy across development, technology, defence, and trade, India can unlock the full potential of this bilateral equation.
Amid fractured neighbourhood ties, Chinese assertiveness, and global uncertainty, Japan is the partner India needs most—not as a friend of the past, nor merely as a fellow member of the Quad, but as a genuine bilateral anchor for the future.
Swasti Rao is a Consulting Editor (International and Strategic Affairs) at ThePrint. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)