In the first episode of The Observing Japan Podcast, I discuss three things to know about Japan's politics this week, including: how Japan was watching the US-China summit; the Hormuz crisis and the impact on Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae's fiscal ambitions; and the Liberal Democratic Party's deliberations on defense spending.

Then, I talked with Eyck Freymann, a Hoover fellow at Stanford University, about his new book, Defending Taiwan.