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Japan has started a "mass exodus" of manufacturing from China as the country moves to become more self-sufficient and less reliant on the Chinese Communist Party's supply chain.The Japanese government is seeking to end reliance on its Chinese neighbor following the coronavirus pandemic that originated in China.

Meanwhile, a Japanese news agency says the NSA asked the Japanese government in 2011 to help it monitor fibre-optic cables carrying personal data through Japan, to the Asia-Pacific region. The reports, carried by the Kyodo news agency, say that this was intended to allow the US to spy on China - but Japan refused, citing legal restrictions and a shortage of personnel. The White House has so far declined to comment on Monday's claims about US spying in Spain, published in the newspapers El Pais and El Mundo. It is alleged that the NSA tracked millions of phone calls, texts...

(Reuters) - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in an interview published on Saturday, said Japan was ready to be more assertive towards China as Beijing threatened to strike back if provoked. A top retired Chinese diplomat said any move by Tokyo to contain China could amount to an attempt to conceal ulterior motives in the region and prove to be "extremely dangerous". And the defence ministry warned Japan not to underestimate China's resolve to take whatever measures were needed to protect itself. Abe, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, said Japan should take the lead in guarding against what he said...

TOKYO - A senior Chinese government official has secretly visited Japan for talks with Japanese officials aimed at improving bilateral relations damaged by an ongoing territorial row, reports said Tuesday. The talks involving a high-ranking official from the Chinese foreign ministry's Asian division were thought to have been held in early October, Japanese news agency Jiji Press reported from Beijing quoting Chinese government sources. A high-ranking official from the Japanese foreign ministry attended the meeting, the report said. A Japanese foreign ministry official declined comment on the content of the report, saying: "Japan and China have been making various exchanges...

Japan scrambled fighter jets Monday after an unidentified drone flew near a small island chain controlled by Tokyo that is at the center of a bitter territorial dispute with China. Japan's Air Self-Defense Force sent an unspecified number of jets to the area of the Senkaku Islands, a Defense Ministry official told Agence France Presse in Tokyo. The ministry said it did not know the origin or nationality of the unmanned aircraft, which did not enter Japanese airspace. China has an advanced drone program, according to a report in June from the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission....

EAST CHINA SEA - Boats carrying about 20 members of a Japanese nationalist group headed back to port on Sunday after sailing near tiny islands in the East China Sea that are at the center of a dispute between Japan and China. Members of the Ganbare Nippon ("Stand Firm, Japan") group did not attempt to land on the uninhabited islands, which are known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, but had said they wanted to send a message to China. "We want to show these islands are under Japanese control," Satoru Mizushima, the right-wing film maker who...

Japanese exports to China in the first half of this year decreased to the lowest level in four years amid strained ties between the top two economies in Asia as well as China's economic slowdown. Despite the depreciation of the yen against the Chinese yuan, Japan's exports to the Chinese mainland declined 16.7 percent year-on-year to $61.43 billion in the January-June period. In the same period, the United States replaced the Chinese mainland as Japan's biggest export market, the first time in five years, with exports valued at $65.56 billion, according to the Japan External Trade Organization. "Japan's decreasing exports...

Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians than “Japanization.” That specter of chronic malaise, deflation and bad debt has driven central bankers from Ben S. Bernanke in the United States to Mario Draghi in Europe to flood markets with liquidity in an effort to avert their own lost decades. It should worry China, then, that experts on this dreaded scenario are turning their attention to Beijing. Take Brian Reading, whose quest to understand what the world can learn from Tokyo’s mess dates back to his prescient 1992 book “Japan: The Coming Collapse.” He recently wrote...

Japan scrambled fighter jets on July 24 after a Chinese military aircraft flew for the first time through international airspace near its southern islands out over the Pacific, in a move seen by Japan as underlining China's maritime expansion. Ties between China and Japan have been strained by a territorial dispute over uninhabited East China Sea islets and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a decisive victory in Upper House elections on July 21. Japan's Defense Ministry said a Chinese Y-8 airborne early warning plane flew through airspace between Okinawa prefecture's main island and the smaller Miyako island in southern...

(CNSNews.com) – Exchanging warnings but avoiding confrontations thus far, Chinese and Japanese ships have come within less than half a nautical mile of each other in an ongoing dispute over the sovereignty of contested islands. Amid deepening tensions in a long-running saga over the uninhabited islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Sunday about the possibility of war between the two Asian countries. “What we don't want is to have any kind of provocative behavior on the part of China or anybody else result in conflict,” he told reporters accompanying him on...

China and other Asian countries could end up at war over territorial disputes if governments keep up their 'provocative behaviour', US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta says. Speaking to reporters before arriving in Tokyo on a trip to Asia, Panetta appealed for restraint amid mounting tensions over territorial rights in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. 'I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands, that it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence, and could result in conflict,'...