The Australia–Japan relationship is critical to energy, economic and regional security, and must be strengthened to respond to a more fragmented and uncertain global order.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will visit Australia in early May 2026 – on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and almost 70 years on from the 1957 Agreement on Commerce that started it all – an important time for the bilateral relationship and regional stability.

Disruptions to oil and fertiliser supplies due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are the latest in a long line of shocks to a fracturing global order. For Australia and Japan, it is also a moment of clarification. Australia and Japan’s exposure to turmoil in global energy markets underlines a strategic truth that has too easily been taken for granted – that the two countries are existentially important to each other’s economic security.

Australia supplies just under a third of Japan’s energy needs, over two-thirds of its strategic raw materials and a significant share of its imported foodstuffs. There is no other bilateral relationship in the developed world that combines such deep economic complementarity, an alliance partnership with the United States and a stake in a stable and open rules-based international order.

The starting point is to recognise that the disruption now reshaping the global order is not temporary. The combination of a US–Israel war against Iran, a protectionist and revisionist United States, the steady unwinding of........

© Pearls and Irritations