The idea of a Japan–India partnership in the Indo-Pacific has today acquired an almost axiomatic status in strategic discourse. It is routinely invoked as a stabilizing force, a democratic counterweight, and a pillar of the emerging regional order.
Yet, to appreciate the depth and potential of this partnership in the 21st century, it is essential to look backwards before rushing forward—to understand how Japan and India conducted themselves in the 20th century, often under trying and asymmetric circumstances, and how those historical choices now shape their contemporary convergence.
During the Second World War, India was not initially a central concern in Japan’s strategic imagination. Japan’s war effort was focused on East and Southeast Asia, and India entered its calculations only at a late stage. The war years thus did not produce a natural foundation for a bilateral partnership.
Instead, they generated a complex legacy marked by defeat, occupation, reparations, and the remaking of Asia’s political order under American primacy. Japan lost the war; India emerged as an independent nation but immediately confronted the dilemmas of Cold War geopolitics and postcolonial state-building.
In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender, the shaping of postwar Japan took place largely without Indian participation. The United States invited the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China to join the Far Eastern Advisory Commission (FEC).
Still, India’s voice was marginal despite its moral stature as a soon-to-be independent Asian power. By December 1945, a consensus had formed around the FEC, embedding Japan within a US-led security and economic framework. This exclusion could have fostered resentment. Instead, India chose a markedly different path.
Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, serving at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) from May 3, 1946 to November 12, 1948, delivered a historic 1,235-page dissent in November 1948, rejecting the prosecution of Japanese leaders for Class A “crimes against peace” as ex post facto law and condemning “victor’s justice.”
While acknowledging wartime atrocities, he firmly distinguished between Japan’s militarist elite and the Japanese people, arguing against collective punishment and concluding that the accused could not be legally convicted under international law.
Though his dissent was not accepted and seven leaders were executed on December 23, 1948, Pal’s judgment sent a powerful moral signal that India stood with the Japanese people, a stance later reinforced by India’s refusal to seek reparations in 1952, laying an ethical foundation for enduring India–Japan goodwill.
One of the most remarkable episodes in Japan–India relations occurred in 1952, when India refused to receive war reparations from Japan. At a time when many countries were scrambling for compensation, India adopted a magnanimous and forward-looking stance. It extended Most Favored Nation status to Japan and received the same in return.
More strikingly, India became the first country to provide Official Development Assistance to Japan—a gesture almost unthinkable in conventional victor–vanquished logic. This decision was not merely symbolic; it reflected India’s civilizational confidence and its belief that reconciliation, not retribution, was the foundation of a stable Asia.
The philosophical underpinnings of this approach resonate deeply with the shared intellectual heritage later articulated in political language. Mughal prince Dara Shikoh’s notion of Majma-ul-Bahrain—the “Confluence of the Two Oceans”—captured the synthesis of Hindu Vedantic and Islamic Sufi traditions.
Centuries later, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invoked this very imagery in his 2007 speech to the Indian Parliament, titled “Confluence of the Two Seas,” reimagining it in geopolitical terms for the Indo-Pacific era. Abe’s speech was not a rhetorical flourish; it was a declaration that Japan and India saw their destinies as interconnected across the maritime commons.
The formalization of this convergence unfolded gradually. The year 2000 marked the beginning of a Japan–India “Global Partnership,” upgraded in 2006 to a “Strategic and Global Partnership.” By 2011, trilateral dialogues involving India, Japan, and the United States were taking shape, reflecting shared concerns about regional stability.
Japan’s endorsement of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” in 2016 and the revival of the Quad (India–Japan–US–Australia) from 2017 onward further institutionalized this alignment. These developments were not abrupt departures but the culmination of a long process of strategic learning.
Central to this learning has been the maritime domain. Both Japan and India are acutely aware that sea lanes of commerce are the lifelines of their economies. As Shinzo Abe once remarked—half in jest but fully in strategic seriousness—“Let ‘Popeye’ eat spinach for a while,” stressing the importance of strengthening one’s own capabilities even while cooperating with allies.
Japan has long depended on the United States for maritime security, but has also expressed concern that a hegemon’s muscles may weaken over time. In this context, India’s growing naval capacity, including aircraft carriers, is seen in Tokyo as a stabilizing factor for Asian sea lanes, reassuring not only Japan but also partners such as Vietnam, South Korea, and the United States.
Yet, the Japan–India partnership is not free from conceptual debates. Competing visions—Japan’s “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” and India’s “Arc of Advantage and Prosperity”—reflect differing emphases on values, development, and strategic autonomy.
These are not contradictions but productive tensions, allowing both countries to coordinate without surrendering their independent worldviews. This flexibility is precisely what distinguishes the partnership from rigid alliance structures.
China, inevitably, looms large in this equation—as both opportunity and risk. Despite strained political relations, China remains Japan’s largest trading partner in Asia, and economic interdependence constrains Tokyo’s strategic choices. For India, China represents both a developmental benchmark and a security challenge.
While Japan’s interest in India has surged alongside India’s economic rise, roadblocks—regulatory hurdles, infrastructure bottlenecks, and differing business cultures—still impede the full realisation of Japanese investment potential in India. The partnership, therefore, is as much about domestic reform as external balancing.
The “money matter” is inseparable from strategy. Ancient Indian statecraft captured this succinctly in the maxim Kosh Muloo Dand—the treasury is the root of power. Economic strength underwrites diplomatic influence, military capability, and strategic autonomy.
Both Japan and India understand that without sustained economic growth and technological innovation, their Indo-Pacific vision will remain aspirational. This is why connectivity projects, industrial corridors, and supply-chain resilience have become central pillars of bilateral cooperation.
At the same time, historical memory tempers strategic optimism. South Asia’s security architecture was profoundly altered in 1972 when US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger visited Beijing, ending two decades of hostility between Washington and China.
Pakistan’s role as the secret channel in this rapprochement elevated its strategic value and created a long-term US–China–Pakistan alignment that reshaped India’s threat perceptions.
For India, this episode reiterated the dangers of great-power bargains conducted over the heads of regional actors—a lesson that continues to inform its insistence on strategic autonomy even within partnerships.
Viewed in this broader historical and strategic context, Japan–India relations in the 21st century are neither a marriage of convenience nor a simple anti-China coalition. They represent a layered partnership rooted in historical restraint, civilizational confidence and pragmatic convergence.
From India’s moral courage to stand with Japan at the Tokyo Trial to the refusal of reparations in 1952 to the articulation of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, the relationship has evolved through choices that prioritised long-term stability over short-term gain.
As the Indo-Pacific becomes the primary theater of global politics, the Japan–India partnership will be tested by shifting power balances, economic uncertainties, and domestic constraints.
Its success will depend not only on naval exercises and strategic dialogues but also on sustained economic cooperation, people-to-people ties, and mutual sensitivity to each other’s strategic cultures. The confluence of the two seas, after all, is not a static meeting point but a dynamic flow—one that requires constant navigation.
In this sense, Japan and India are not simply constructing a partnership for the 21st century; rather, they are cautiously re-engaging with an older strategic wisdom articulated in contemporary geopolitical language—that stability in Asia is less likely to arise from dominance or bloc politics than from carefully managed balance, strategic restraint and a calibrated sharing of responsibility across the interconnected maritime spaces of the Indo-Pacific.
This approach acknowledges power asymmetries, historical sensitivities and external dependencies, and recognizes that any durable regional order must rest not on coercive leadership, but on prudence, reciprocity and the disciplined avoidance of strategic overreach.
Dr. Saroj Kumar Rath (sarojkumarratha@cvs.du.ac.in) is an assistant professor at the University of Delhi. His research focuses on India’s foreign policy, maritime security and regional cooperation, particularly the evolution of India-Japan strategic relations. An abridged version of this article was presented at the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific-organized conference in Tokyo on November 19, 2025.
