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Since the 1970s, EU–Japan ties remained polite but peripheral as Tokyo stayed U.S.-anchored; even after the 1991 Joint Declaration and 2001 Action Plan, integration lagged trans-Pacific priorities until the 2008 GFC widened macro-financial dialogue and encouraged hedging via closer EU engagement (Hook et al., 2005; Gilson, 2000; EU–Japan Centre, 2001; Barysch, 2010; Katada, 2011). Successive shocks—Fukushima, COVID-19, and Russia’s war against Ukraine—converted incrementalism into cooperation across energy, health, sanctions, and economic security (Kingston, 2012; Davis et al., 2021; Smith, 2022; Hughes, 2023). The sequence culminated in legally codified frameworks—the EPA/SPA, the Green Alliance, and the Digital Partnership—linking values to concrete industrial and regulatory coordination (EU, 2018; European Commission, 2021; EU–Japan Summit, 2022).

Methodologically, process tracing and crisis-based periodization are used, triangulating EU and Japanese primary documents with macroeconomic indicators, while incorporating leader-level politics shaping sanction alignment and signaling pre-2022 (Brown, 2016). Against the U.S. reference point, post-2008 engagement is evaluated as hedging versus strategic convergence (Keohane, 2022). Cumulatively, these crises elevated a long-standing, low-salience partnership into a structured pillar of economic-security governance, outlining scenarios for resilience and de-risking across Europe and the Indo-Pacific.