Neighbors Who Cannot Move

On November 7, 2025, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae answered a question about Taiwan in a committee room in Tokyo. Within weeks China had warned its citizens away from Japan, halted Japanese seafood imports, tightened exports of rare earths and dual-use goods, and demanded a retraction that never came.

Zahir Hasan argues that the quarrel exposed a settlement built in 1972 for a world that has vanished: a poor China beside a rich Japan, a predictable America, and a sea that neither side could yet patrol day after day. All three conditions are gone. Tracing the story from the Treaty of Shimonoseki to the fire-control radar incident of December 2025, he shows how ambiguity kept the peace for half a century and why it can no longer do so on its own.

Neither nostalgia nor confrontation will serve. The book makes the case for defended coexistence: credible defense and civil resilience, precise legal language, targeted economic security instead of decoupling, and crisis rules that hold even when the two governments are not speaking.

Drawing on the scholarly literature, official records from Tokyo and Beijing, and events through mid-October 2026, Neighbors Who Cannot Move is a clear, argued guide for students, policy readers, and anyone who wants to understand the most important relationship in Asia.