Pro-China entities have attempted to use disinformation to undermine democracy and social cohesion in Japan. This has included targeting Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her government through state media, diplomatic channels and coordinated online campaigns across the Indo-Pacific region. Japanese authorities have responded by expanding fact-checking and issuing rebuttals backed by authenticated information. But government agencies presently have few powers to block content, punish those spreading disinformation, or publicly attribute attacks to foreign state actors. Japan would benefit from studying and working with Australia as it considers how best to strengthen counter-disinformation powers as part of wider security reforms.
China has been spreading anti-Takaichi disinformation across the region to influence public opinion. Early this year, a false narrative spread in Taiwan claiming that Takaichi’s grandfather was a soldier during the Japanese invasion of China and was involved in executions by beheading. This disinformation sought to not only confuse voters in Japan but also sway public opinion in Taiwan, illustrating how a single fabricated narrative can be simultaneously weaponised across multiple audiences in different countries.
This wave of disinformation correlates with Beijing’s wider attempts to coerce Japan, particularly since Takaichi took a robust stance over Taiwan.
In November 2025, Takaichi told the Japanese parliament explicitly about her concern for the country’s survival in the case of a Taiwan contingency. Beijing seized on these remarks, amplifying them through state-run media and digital platforms to construct unfavourable narratives. Chinese state media misrepresented Takaichi’s remarks as signalling possible Japanese military intervention in the Taiwan Strait, while repeating longstanding claims over Okinawa. The campaign was further amplified online by Chinese diplomats. This fits Beijing’s pattern of instrumentalising the Okinawa question to fracture domestic Japanese opinion whenever it seeks geopolitical leverage.
At the same time, Beijing falsely alleged a sharp rise in crimes against Chinese nationals in Japan, prompting a prompt rebuttal from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which published validated statistics from the National Police Agency. The episode demonstrated both the speed of state-backed disinformation and, despite the swift response of Japanese authorities, the limitations of reactive fact-correction.
While Beijing has not acknowledged any role in spreading disinformation, the messages circulating online align with China’s diplomatic rhetoric. When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in December 2025, he reiterated that Taiwan is ‘an inalienable part of China’s territory’ and that these nations reaffirmed so. Also, he accused Japan of being motivated by ‘militarism’. The synchronisation of these diplomatic talking points with concurrent online narratives reinforce how state information operations and formal diplomacy function as mutually reinforcing instruments. Analysts have linked this pattern to broader ‘discourse power’ strategies pursued by Beijing’s propaganda apparatus.
While Japanese authorities have responded promptly to many instances of disinformation, the cumulative picture reveals structural gaps that reactive responses alone cannot close.
Japan’s legal framework for combating disinformation is still relatively underdeveloped compared to other peer democratic countries, including Australia. There are presently no direct criminal penalties for spreading disinformation, nor provisions for confiscating illicit profits derived from it. When disinformation causes harm to a specific individual or organisation, it is addressed indirectly under existing penal code provisions – defamation, fraud, or obstruction of business by fraudulent means. While Japan may not need new and dedicated provisions, it would at the very least need to update existing provisions so that they specifically address state-backed information manipulation.
Currently, Japan’s Public Offices Election Act provides powers to intervene if disinformation threatens electoral integrity, but those powers are harder to invoke when disinformation targets public opinion about government policy rather than election candidates. Even if a disinformation campaign has severe negative impact, authorities can only request, not mandate, that platforms remove content. This creates a structural asymmetry: foreign state actors can act with speed and scale while Japanese authorities are constrained to polite requests.
Under current Japanese law, many interventions require a court warrant, a threshold that demands substantial proof and time. While judicial oversight of such powers is both necessary and right in a democracy, the procedural framework was not designed for simultaneous operations across multiple vectors and sustaining campaigns over years.
Beyond government, Japanese citizens and businesses have limited recourse. Those seeking removal of false and defamatory content must pursue voluntary action under the Information Distribution Platform Act. This stipulates that victims need to ask the provider directly – not via the authorities – to remove content. Since the law has been in effect for only a few years, there is still room for discussion as to whether it is wholly adequate against coordinated foreign campaigns that can regenerate removed content almost instantly.
As the Takaichi government considers how to close these legal gaps, it should look to Australia, not as a model to copy wholesale, but as a working partner with hard-won experience navigating similar challenges. Australia has drawn international attention for its under-16s social media ban and its legislative distinction between foreign influence and foreign interference – a conceptual separation that has helped sharpen policy responses and attribution efforts. Less well-known internationally is Australia’s ongoing work on platform accountability and its government-led disinformation research partnerships, both of which offer practical lessons for Japan.
Critically, neither country has yet perfectly cracked the hardest problem: how democratic governments can act swiftly against state-backed disinformation campaigns without empowering the same legal machinery that authoritarian states misuse to silence dissent. Australia and Japan already consult and cooperate on this challenge, but the pace and complexity of modern information operations, increasingly turbocharged by AI, are outrunning existing mechanisms. The task now is to elevate and embed that cooperation, so it becomes structural rather than episodic. That means deepening permanent working-level channels between agencies. It also means drawing in civil society researchers and specialist private-sector firms in both countries that are often detecting and analysing AI-enabled disinformation campaigns faster than governments can.
Formalising those relationships – through joint research frameworks, shared early-warning protocols and regular cross-sector exercises – would give both democracies a more dynamic and resilient posture. With hybrid threats from China intensifying across the Indo-Pacific, the architecture for that cooperation should be built now – before the next campaign, not in response to it.
