By Meng Kit Tang
More than a dozen bilateral summits over thirty years. Three maritime communication hotlines. Two crisis management mechanisms. One East China Sea negotiating process that has never produced a code of conduct. At some point, the accumulation of diplomatic effort without structural result stops looking like failure and starts looking like an outcome.
The standard accounts are not wrong. Historical grievance is real. Nationalist publics in both countries constrain what governments can concede. The security dilemma between a rising China and a rearming Japan generates genuine mutual suspicion. But these explanations share a common assumption: that both sides are trying to resolve the tensions and being prevented by forces beyond their control.
Every mechanism designed to reduce tension has produced the same result across different governments and different leaders. Dialogue proceeds. Atmospherics improve. Structures remain untouched.
To explain why, this piece turns to an unlikely source. After the 2016 release of Shin Godzilla, Toho Studios formalised a set of operational protocols for the franchise: the monster never completely dies, never preys or eats, never speaks, and must be portrayed as god-like and non-emotive. The rules were designed to keep a threat maximally useful without allowing it to become either solvable or catastrophic.
What follows applies those rules to four dimensions of that relationship: the investment both sides have built around the threat's persistence, the daily grammar through which that persistence is maintained, the cultural evidence visible in Japanese popular film, and the conditions under which the system might finally break. Neither government consciously chooses permanent rivalry. Both have built arrangements that make rivalry the path of least resistance regardless of intent.
Why Resolution Is Costly
Both China and Japan have developed institutional arrangements in which bilateral tension is not merely a problem to be managed but a condition around which important political, bureaucratic, and strategic functions have been organized. The costs of genuine normalization are often higher than they first appear.
Japan's post-2015 strategic transformation illustrates the point. The reinterpretation of collective self-defense, the acquisition of counterstrike capability, the Tomahawk procurement, the ¥43 trillion five-year defense plan, and the fortification of the southwestern island chain have all been justified by reference to a deteriorating regional security environment, particularly China's growing military power. The threat perception is real.
Yet threat perceptions become embedded within institutions over time. Bureaucracies expand. Defense programs acquire constituencies. Strategic doctrines evolve around assumptions of enduring competition. A China that genuinely moderated its regional behavior would not automatically reverse these developments. The architecture created in response to the threat develops its own momentum.
The Chinese side operates through a different mechanism. Since the 1990s, patriotic education campaigns have elevated the memory of Japanese aggression into a central component of modern Chinese national identity.
The Imperial Japanese Army's conduct across China from the 1930s through 1945, including the Nanjing Massacre and the systematic use of forced labor, provides the raw material that official narratives have shaped into a durable and politically durable grievance.
Japan is not the sole antagonist within this narrative, but it remains one of its most recognizable symbols. Economic difficulties since 2022 have increased the political value of nationalism as a source of legitimacy. Yet nationalism is not infinitely controllable. The anti-Japanese protests of 2005 and the backlash following the 2012 Senkaku crisis demonstrated that public sentiment can exceed the state's preferred temperature and impose costs on Beijing itself.
This asymmetry also surfaces in cultural production. No Chinese popular culture text processes Beijing's relationship with Japan through the kind of sustained ambiguity visible in the Godzilla franchise. Wolf warrior films and state-adjacent historical dramas tend toward resolution: the adversary is defeated, humiliation is avenged, sovereignty is restored.
The narrative lines are clean because the ideological architecture requires them to be. Japanese popular culture, by contrast, has spent seventy years sitting with an unresolved monster, and the sitting itself is part of the argument.
The Senkaku Islands, administered by Japan and claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands, have served as the primary geographic pressure point for this competition since Japan's nationalization of the islands in 2012 triggered the most severe bilateral deterioration of the postwar period.
Following that crisis, both governments expanded and formalized their maritime presence around the disputed islands without any documented bilateral agreement governing the process.
Tokyo institutionalized Japan Coast Guard rotations in the contiguous zone. Beijing steadily increased China Coast Guard operations, culminating in 357 operational days in Senkaku waters in 2025 alone. These developments were not coordinated, nor do they indicate a shared strategy. What they reveal is something subtler: both sides adapted to recurring tensions by creating bureaucratic and operational structures that assume those tensions will continue.
Rivalry became institutionalized. Reinhard Drifte and Ming Wan have argued that economic interdependence moderates the rivalry, and interdependence has indeed reduced escalation risks. It has not eliminated the competition infrastructure built alongside it.
How Ambiguity Is Sustained
The institutional pressures described above do not stay at the level of budget cycles and party congresses. They shape the operational texture of the relationship day to day, most visibly in how both sides handle Taiwan and the Senkaku patrols.
Since 2021, Japanese political statements concerning Taiwan have grown progressively more explicit. Takaichi Sanae's November 2025 declaration that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could constitute a survival-threatening situation for Japan was the most direct formulation yet. Beijing's responses have grown sharper and more frequent. Yet neither side has crossed into complete clarity. Japan has not formally committed to Taiwan's defense. China has not publicly defined a threshold that would trigger direct confrontation with Japan.
This ambiguity persists because the alternatives are costly. A formal Japanese commitment would force Beijing into difficult public choices regarding deterrence and escalation. A formally declared Chinese red line would compel Tokyo to clarify alliance obligations both governments currently prefer to leave flexible. The silence rule in Toho's production manual captures what is happening: a threat that can speak becomes a negotiating partner, and negotiating partners get bounded.
The pattern is visible in maritime operations as well. China's 357 coast guard days in the Senkaku contiguous zone in 2025 were calibrated to challenge Japan's administrative control without crossing thresholds likely to trigger a Self-Defence Force response. Japan responded through coast guard deployments rather than military escalation. Patrol follows patrol. Presence answers presence.
There is a distinction worth making here that the existing literature tends to collapse. Managing the probability of a crisis and preparing for its consequences are different activities requiring different institutional logics. Military exercises, alliance coordination, and force modernization address the latter. Strategic ambiguity operates in the former domain, keeping disputes active without forcing binary decisions.
Much of what observers describe as deterrence signaling may also serve this less visible function of preserving flexibility. The Taiwan statement sequence is a case in point: specific enough to signal resolve, vague enough to withdraw if needed, graduated enough to adjust as the temperature requires.
The Cultural Register: What Japanese Society Is Processing
Shin Godzilla came out in 2016. The film is usually described as a satire of bureaucratic dysfunction, which is accurate but incomplete. The deeper subject is what happens when institutional procedures designed for one kind of threat encounter a fundamentally different one.
Every response sequence in the film's first half assumes a predatory adversary: something that selects targets, makes decisions, and can be deterred by raising the cost of aggression. Godzilla does not select targets. It moves through the city because the city is there. The officials are not incompetent. Their categories are wrong.
Japan's interagency frameworks for the Senkaku situation were developed across different legal authorities and ministry jurisdictions and do not integrate cleanly. The Japan Coast Guard operates under the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The Maritime Self-Defence Force falls under the Ministry of Defense. The legal thresholds governing when one hands off to the other were not designed with an adversary in mind that specifically calibrates its operations to remain below those thresholds.
The 2022 National Security Strategy began addressing the integration problem. How much progress has been made is not entirely clear from the public record.
Godzilla Minus One, released in 2023, takes a different approach. By sidelining state institutions and centering a civilian response, the film asks less about institutional design than about Japan's future direction. The civilians succeed because the state has failed them, yet the film never settled whether that success is admirable or troubling.
These films are not allegories to be deciphered. They are evidence of a society working through strategic anxieties long before they fully entered policy discourse.
Falsifiability: Three Exit Conditions and One Open Question
Three developments could break the system, though not with equal likelihood.
The most immediate would be a Taiwan crisis that forced binary choices. A genuine PLA blockade requiring Japan to choose between alliance commitments and strategic irrelevance would collapse the operational space both sides currently occupy. The considerable effort Beijing and Tokyo devote to keeping Taiwan below that threshold suggests their behavior is often better understood as probability management than military preparation.
The second possibility is a domestic legitimacy shock in China. If sustained economic recovery reduced the Party's reliance on nationalist mobilization, the political value of maintaining Japan as a symbolic adversary could diminish. The correlation between economic slowdowns and spikes in anti-Japanese media amplification since 2012 suggests the relationship between domestic pressure and external scapegoating is not incidental.
The third is gradual escalation. The post-2012 institutionalization of coast guard operations established a higher baseline for competition, with no clear mechanism for returning to a lower one. If each crisis resets the baseline upward, the system's long-term stability depends on both sides continuing to exercise restraint and judgment under political pressures that do not always reward either.
The Monster That Must Not Die
The conventional response to persistent tension is to recommend more dialogue, better communication channels, and stronger confidence-building measures.
Three decades of summits, hotlines, and track-two dialogues have produced valuable outcomes: reduced misunderstandings, improved communication, and help managing moments of acute tension. What they have not produced is resolution. Recommending more of the same to this system is like recommending Toho hire better scriptwriters to finally kill Godzilla. It misunderstands what the system is for.
The institutions created to manage rivalry have gradually become part of the architecture that reproduces it. Competition generates management mechanisms. Management mechanisms reduce the acute risks of competition and thereby make competition more sustainable.
Beijing's management of historical memory illustrates one concrete example of where the pattern becomes specific enough to examine. The amplification of anti-Japanese grievance around Party congresses and periods of economic stress, and its moderation when Japanese investment is being courted, is documented and observable. It is calibration, not sentiment.
A multilateral framework with third-party verification of educational and memorial content would address this at its source. The fact that no such proposal has ever advanced seriously in regional diplomacy tells you something about what both sides actually consider negotiable.
The Godzilla franchise survives because the monster can never be fully defeated, fully understood, or fully domesticated. It remains dangerous enough to justify concern but not so dangerous that the story ends.
Every new crisis, every new patrol regime, every new defense initiative raises the baseline from which future competition begins. The mechanisms that preserve stability today may also drive gradual escalation tomorrow. The production rules guarantee the monster's survival. They say nothing about the size it reaches.
