In 2006, Australians felt about the same warmth toward Japan and China. Twenty years later, that is no longer remotely true.
The Lowy Institute’s feelings thermometer provides a good lens into this. Japan registered 64 degrees that year; China scored 61. By 2025, Japan had climbed to 76, above the United Kingdom, while China had fallen to 37, only above Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Nine in ten Australians now trust Japan to act responsibly in the world, a record for any country in two decades of polling. Japan has been named Australia’s best friend in Asia for three consecutive years, and 45% want closer security ties.
New Zealand’s data runs parallel. The Asia New Zealand Foundation’s Perceptions of Asia survey shows 80% calling Japan a friend in 2025, up from 67% in 2018, with 63% expressing high trust, on par with the United Kingdom. Nearly 30% would choose Japanese if offered the chance to learn an Asian language, the highest for any Asian language in the survey.
The period 2018–22 appears decisive for the current state of relations. As the Australia–China relationship soured through Huawei’s 5G exclusion, the Covid-19 origins inquiry, and trade coercion targeting barley, wine, coal, and beef, Australian trust in China fell from 52% to 12%. Japan rose as China fell. The 2022 Reciprocal Access Agreement, Japan’s first defence arrangement outside the United States, formalised what public sentiment already supported.
In New Zealand, friend perceptions of China fell from 38% in late 2024 to 21% in a March 2025 snap poll conducted after China’s live-fire naval exercises in the Tasman Sea and its strategic partnership with the Cook Islands. Only 14% of New Zealanders report high trust in China.
Tokyo is increasingly seen not as a complementary ally within the American order but as a stabilising anchor in its own right.
Declining trust in the United States makes Japan’s position more consequential still. In Australia, US trust has dropped to 36%, the lowest in two decades. In New Zealand’s March snap poll, only 32% still regarded the United States as a friend, down from 61% months earlier. Tokyo is increasingly seen not as a complementary ally within the American order but as a stabilising anchor in its own right.
The shift has been driven by strategy and culture alike. China’s assertiveness reshaped who publics consider reliable. At the same time, a record 1,058,300 Australians visited Japan in 2025, the first time the number exceeded one million – a 15% increase on 2024. Food, animation, gaming, and travel have built a familiarity that feels settled rather than tentative, particularly among younger cohorts.
But the future of this relationship still depends on what Japan might do next. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks that a Taiwan contingency would constitute a survival-threatening situation permitting military action in November 2025 prompted retaliatory wolf-warrior diplomacy from Beijing, which only strengthened her domestic approval rates.
A government survey in 2024 found that 86.7% of Japanese reported feeling no affinity toward China, the lowest since the survey began in 1978. Another government survey in November 2025 showed 68% naming Chinese military activities as their top security concern, with a record 94% expressing favourable views of the Self-Defence Forces.
In February 2026, Takaichi led the LDP to a historic two-thirds supermajority, giving her a strong mandate for advancing a more assertive Japan. She has committed to doubling defence spending to 2% of GDP, signalled intent to revisit non-nuclear principles and pursue amendments to Article 9, pushed anti-espionage legislation, a national intelligence council, and eased arms export rules. Some argue these measures could effectively prepare Japan to join AUKUS.
Whether Australian and New Zealand publics, whose warmth has been built on Japan’s image as a peace-loving democracy, will extend the same trust to a Japan that is more assertive, more heavily armed, and potentially post-pacifist remains to be seen. The warmth recorded in two decades of polling reflects a Japan that has not yet fully arrived at that destination. How the publics on both sides of the Tasman respond as it does will be one of the more consequential tests of the relationship.
