Dependency, Resilience, and Reconciliation Across Taiwan, Japan, China, and the United States
By Meng Kit Tang
Why East Asia Needs a Humanized Strategic Framework
Mainstream International Relations theory explains power balances, deterrence, and alliances in East Asia with technical precision. What it often misses are the quieter forces that shape behavior just as deeply. Emotional asymmetry, dependency anxiety, and moral narratives rooted in history and identity influence how leaders interpret risk and responsibility. Decisions in Taipei, Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington rest not only on capability assessments, but also on fears of abandonment, concerns over dignity, and expectations of restraint. When structural approaches bracket these dimensions, they describe outcomes without fully explaining motivation.
This gap appears most clearly in asymmetric relationships. Taiwan calibrates its defense through military logic and persistent unease about external reliance. Japan advances its regional role cautiously, balancing new capabilities against postwar moral limits. China pressures Taiwan and signals toward Japan through performances of authority tied to national restoration. The United States acts as protector and manager, shaping incentives while preserving strategic distance. These interactions unfold through shared stories about obligation and hierarchy, not merely through treaties or force deployments.
Scholars have examined asymmetry, most notably Brantly Womack’s work on relational stability in unequal dyads. Yet this literature remains anchored in structure and bargaining. It clarifies leverage, but says less about how vulnerability feels, how restraint is learned, or why dominance often seeks recognition alongside compliance. This article proposes a humanized framework grounded in Fujiko F. Fujio’s Doraemon. Familiar across East Asia, Doraemon offers a practical language for understanding dependency, growth under pressure, and unequal bonds. Used as a heuristic rather than allegory, the framework exposes durable relational patterns beneath shifting material conditions.
The empirical context reinforces this need. As of January 2026, the United States continues implementing a $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan, omits an explicit “One China” reference in its National Security Strategy, and responds to intensified China–Japan signaling over Taiwan amid new PLA capability milestones. Japan’s supportive role illustrates the framework’s relevance. The Chinese idiom 伸出援手 (“extending a hand of aid”) finds playful echo in Doraemon’s 伸出圆手: a rounded, gentle paw that provides tools without grasping control. Recent actions reflect this: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s November 2025 Diet statement affirming collective self-defense in a Taiwan contingency signaled commitment despite provoking Beijing, while Taiwan’s “sushi diplomacy” reciprocated solidarity. These exchanges may appear tactical. In reality, they reveal something more enduring: East Asian security rests less on raw power than on disciplined relationships, where support must feel respectful, coercion must remain bounded, and resilience grows through repeated exposure to imbalance.
The Doraemon Framework and Its Theoretical Foundations
Origins and Core Themes of Doraemon Theory
Fujiko F. Fujio’s Doraemon has shaped the moral imagination of East Asia since its debut in 1969. The story follows Nobita, a weak and anxious child who depends on Doraemon, a robotic cat from the future, to navigate recurring crises. Doraemon’s tools provide short-term relief but often create new problems, forcing Nobita to confront his own limits. Three core themes give Doraemon analytical leverage:
Dependency enables survival but increases vulnerability when reliance becomes excessive
Moral growth emerges through repeated failure rather than safety
Friendship persists alongside rivalry, as characters such as Gian combine coercion with moments of cooperation.
Power in Doraemon does not resolve conflict. It sustains unstable relationships that demand continual adjustment. These themes mirror East Asian security dynamics shaped by asymmetry, memory, and relational expectations.
Why Metaphor Works in International Relations
International Relations scholars often rely on metaphors to clarify complex strategic behavior. Graham Allison’s models of decision-making use stylized lenses to expose different causal logics, while Nissim Otmazgin’s workshows how popular culture structures regional expectations. The Doraemon framework follows this tradition but draws a firm line between allegory and heuristic. This framework does not suggest that states act like fictional characters. Instead, it uses Doraemon as a heuristic to help map recurring relational patterns such as protection, coercion, restraint, and moral learning. Its strength lies in revealing emotional asymmetries and role expectations that realist or liberal models often overlook, thereby complementing rather than competing with structural theories.
Methodological Clarification
The Doraemon framework functions as a mid-level interpretive tool. It does not predict outcomes or replace analysis of capabilities and alliances. Its value lies in clarifying how actors understand dependence, responsibility, and rivalry under pressure. The framework cannot explain domestic politics or sudden ideological shifts, and it loses relevance under conditions of total war. These limits maintain analytical discipline and allow the framework to be tested against empirical developments.
Mapping East Asian Actors Through Doraemon Roles
The Doraemon framework assigns familiar roles to East Asian actors to highlight recurring patterns of vulnerability, support, coercion, and orchestration. These roles capture behavioral logics that shape strategic interaction under pressure. Nobita represents Taiwan. Taiwan faces structural asymmetry and constant external pressure. It survives not through strength but through adaptation, learning, and resilience. Democratic governance, civil defense, and technological upgrading reflect growth through repeated challenges. Doraemon represents Japan. Doraemon wields advanced tools yet acts with restraint. Japan mirrors this through selective engagement with Taiwan, including semiconductor investments, disaster relief funding, and careful political signaling such as statements by senior leaders like Sanae Takaichi. Japan provides support without overreach, combining capability with judgment. Gian represents China. Gian asserts dominance through coercion and spectacle, seeking compliance while avoiding irreversible conflict. China’s military exercises, economic leverage, and diplomatic pressure follow the same logic. Sewashi represents the United States. Sewashi guides outcomes without constant presence. The United States underwrites regional order through alliances and strategic signaling, coordinating action while preserving distance. These roles reveal a system where dependency, restraint, coercion, and orchestration coexist in balance.
Relationship Dynamics Through Doraemon Themes
Taiwan–Japan Relations: The Nobita–Doraemon Bond
Taiwan’s relationship with Japan resembles the bond between Nobita and Doraemon. Nobita faces challenges he cannot overcome alone, yet he retains agency through Doraemon’s guidance. Japan provides support that strengthens Taiwan without replacing its responsibility. Recent developments illustrate this dynamic. Former foreign minister Lin Chia-lung’s July 2025 visit to Japan signaled goodwill and reinforced cooperation under regional pressure. Economically, Japan absorbed part of Taiwan’s seafood exports when China imposed restrictions, reducing vulnerability and encouraging market diversification. Like Doraemon’s tools, Japanese support eases immediate pressures while promoting adaptation and self-reliance. This relationship shows that dependency can coexist with agency. Taiwan draws strength from Japanese technological, economic, and diplomatic support, while continuing to invest in civil defense, industrial resilience, and social preparedness. Support fosters resilience when it preserves responsibility and reinforces shared values.
United States–Japan Alliance: Sewashi–Doraemon Coordination
The United States–Japan alliance reflects the Sewashi–Doraemon relationship. Sewashi intervenes selectively, shaping outcomes without managing daily crises. Doraemon carries responsibility on the ground. The United States structures the regional security environment through alliances, arms transfers, and strategic signaling, while encouraging Japan to act as a capable frontline partner. Japan’s growing defense posture and coordination on Taiwan-related contingencies reflect this logic. Their effectiveness depends on trust, clarity of roles, and complementary responsibilities. Too much control would stifle initiative, while too little guidance would invite miscalculation. The Sewashi–Doraemon dynamic shows how orchestration sustains stability without domination. The United States enables Japan’s agency while maintaining broader strategic influence.
Cross-Strait Relations: The Nobita–Gian Asymmetry
Cross-Strait relations resemble the asymmetrical relationship between Nobita and Gian. Gian dominates through intimidation and spectacle, compelling compliance without destroying the group. China’s military exercises, diplomatic pressure, and economic coercion operate similarly, signaling authority while avoiding irreversible escalation. Taiwan navigates this pressure through adaptation, external support, and strategic restraint. Intelligence sharing, coordinated exercises, and crisis management preserve autonomy without overturning the imbalance. Repeated interactions sometimes soften dominance, creating unintended coordination among Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. These patterns illustrate that agency survives even under coercive pressure. The Nobita–Gian dynamic explains coexistence under asymmetry. Resilience develops through disciplined adaptation rather than direct confrontation, showing how support, rivalry, and repeated interactions shape strategic outcomes.
Episodic Scenario Modeling: “Gian’s Concert” as Behavioral Simulation
The recurring episode “Gian’s Concert” serves as a behavioral simulation, revealing patterns of coercion, cooperation, and moral growth among asymmetric actors. Focusing on one arc allows observation of consistent strategic tendencies. In the episode, Gian forcefully organizes a concert and compels Nobita and his friends to participate or attend. He initially employs bullying and threats, creating a high-pressure environment. Nobita responds with reluctance and anxiety, yet he increasingly relies on Doraemon’s gadgets to navigate obstacles and mitigate risk. Over time, the group moves from coercion to hesitant cooperation. Doraemon’s interventions provide practical solutions while fostering agency and resilience in Nobita. Eventually, Gian’s performance is redeemed through collective effort, and the group achieves harmony, illustrating how dominance can soften when structured support and empathy are present.
The episode models three dynamics in East Asian geopolitics. Nobita’s reliance on Doraemon mirrors Taiwan’s dependence on Japan for economic, technological, and diplomatic support. Sewashi’s guidance, reflected in Doraemon’s planning, parallels the United States coordinating Japan’s frontline role, enabling outcomes without substituting Japan’s agency. Gian’s coercion and eventual moderation illustrate how cross-Strait asymmetries can evolve toward tolerable coexistence when shared stakes foster accommodation.
China’s large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, including the Joint Sword series and 2025–2026 blockade simulations, resemble the dynamics illustrated in “Gian’s Concert.” These coercive displays compel attention and coordination among Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. Yet, they sometimes produce unintended benefits: improved intelligence sharing, accelerated Japanese defense normalization, and space for back-channel diplomacy. The performance is tolerated rather than fully confronted, showing how structural asymmetry can coexist with pragmatic interdependence and how crises can strengthen resilience and enable latent reconciliation.
Policy Implications: A Practitioner’s Lens
The Doraemon framework, as a heuristic, does not prescribe specific policies but offers a distinctive outlook for navigating complex, asymmetric relationships in East Asia. It invites policymakers to reflect on how dependency, assertiveness, and coercion interact relationally, and to probe alternative ways of framing strategic choices. For Washington, the Sewashi role highlights the value of restrained orchestration. Over-controlling Japan risks stifling initiative, just as Sewashi avoids micromanaging Doraemon. U.S. strategy should prioritize enabling Japan’s frontline role through intelligence sharing, joint planning, and capacity-building incentives while maintaining strategic flexibility. This approach sustains alliance credibility without creating resentment or entrapment.
In Tokyo, the Doraemon metaphor encourages balanced assertiveness. Japan can extend support through economic aid, technology transfers, and disaster-relief cooperation without provoking irreversible backlash from Beijing. Examples such as semiconductor partnerships and Taiwan’s “sushi diplomacy” show how targeted assistance strengthens resilience while signaling restraint. Pairing support with encouragement of Taiwan’s self-reliance mitigates dependency and preserves strategic room for maneuver.
For Taipei, the Nobita Proposition highlights the value of adaptation. Framing reliance on Japan and the United States as temporary scaffolding, combined with investment in asymmetric capabilities, civil defense, and economic diversification, allows Taiwan to convert vulnerability into durable deterrence.
Even in Beijing, the framework offers a cautionary insight. Gian-like coercive displays often provoke unintended coordination among rivals, strengthening rather than weakening their resilience. Recognizing this dynamic opens space for moral signaling and back-channel diplomacy to reduce miscalculation. Ultimately, the framework counsels all actors to treat security as relational craftsmanship: patience in orchestration, discipline in assertiveness, and prudence in coercion foster stable coexistence amid persistent asymmetries.
Conclusion: Humanized Security in East Asia
The Doraemon framework presents East Asian geopolitics as a balance of dependency, resilience, and restrained rivalry. By translating structural asymmetries into familiar relational patterns, it humanizes interactions that material power alone cannot explain. Taiwan’s adaptation under pressure, Japan’s disciplined support, China’s coercive but bounded dominance, and the United States’ distant orchestration together sustain an uneasy yet durable regional order.
East Asian stability rests on a disciplined management of asymmetry. External support strengthens resilience only when it reinforces self-reliance rather than dependence. Crises, though destabilizing, often accelerate adaptation and coordination among partners. Coercion, meanwhile, can generate unintended alignment among those it seeks to intimidate. These patterns suggest that regional order persists not because imbalances disappear, but because actors learn to operate within them. Stability endures when support remains measured, signaling remains bounded, and rivalry stops short of rupture.
The framework has limits. It cannot predict internal political shifts or rapid escalation into conflict. Its value lies in clarifying patterns of behavior rather than forecasting outcomes. Ultimately, East Asian stability depends not on eliminating imbalance, but on managing it with judgment, patience, and disciplined alliances, showing that resilience and cooperation emerge through repeated trials under pressure.
