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This research paper investigates the evolving defense cooperation between India and Japan in the context of the strategic landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly considering China's rise. The existing literature recognizes China's increasing influence as a significant factor in India-Japanese security cooperation, but tends to overlook the dynamics behind India's shifting stance. The study reveals that India initially hesitated to actively engage in anti-China security cooperation with Japan until the mid-2010s, but later adopted a more proactive partnership. An analysis of policy documents, political speeches, and government records attributes India's initial reluctance to its commitment to non-alignment and strategic autonomy, its desire to balance relations with both China and Japan, and its domestic political priorities favoring economic development over military expansion or strategic alliances. However, growing concerns over China's assertiveness, military modernization, a change in political leadership, and the Quad's development as a regional security platform have prompted India's attitude shift. The research's recommendations not only offer a roadmap for India, Japan, and other Indo-Pacific countries with deep economic ties to China, but also help combat China's military threats to contribute to regional stability and security, address common challenges, and foster a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maritime affairs have been experiencing a state of flux in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly since the beginning of the present decade, attributable to the policies of an assertive China, consequently evoking proportional responses from regional state actors. Amid this transforming scenario, regional states such as India, Japan and Australia have devised policies towards ensuring uninterrupted freedom of navigation and overflight of the Indo-Pacific waterways, given their strategic and commercial sensitivity as sea lanes of communication. The compulsion of sustaining the maritime balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region has necessitated responsible states like India and Japan to forge and bolster bilateral defence cooperation, in keeping with their respective national interests, policies and guidelines. Against this backdrop, this article analyses the impulses, dynamics and challenges of maritime cooperation between India and Japan, particularly in the defence-industrial realm. It underscores the imperative of sustaining and further strengthening the dynamics of bilateral defence-industrial cooperation and optimally exploring the opportunities unveiled by policies like "Make in India", in sync with Japan's quest for defence modernisation and development, towards securing a free and open Indo-Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India–Japan security cooperation is a critical component in the evolving security mechanism of the Indo-Pacific region. Both states are secondary states in the international system that opposes one country's emergence as a regional hegemon. China's rise and her ambition to dominate the Indo-Pacific would affect the security interests of India and Japan. The U.S., the current preponderant power in the region, seems unable to contain China by itself. So it is looking for strategic partnerships with regional countries who are militarily capable of challenging China, and persuading them to balance China. In this regard, the two powerful states in China's own backyard – Japan in the western Pacific and India in the Indian Ocean – have come together to counter the Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. In this effort, they have gradually built up naval cooperation sans a formal military alliance. They follow soft balancing strategies over hard balancing ones because neither wants to antagonise China. Similarly both countries seek to expand their presence through mutual cooperation beyond South-east Asia. This article explains the nature and context of soft power balancing strategies and the manner in which the India–Japan maritime security cooperation has evolved over the last two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]