Something interesting came through on the Sankei Shimbun yesterday, to the effect that Japan was joining AUKUS:
![Twitter avatar for @KantaroKomiya](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KantaroKomiya.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @Sankei_news](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/Sankei_news.jpg)
About thirteen hours later came the official denial:
![Twitter avatar for @KantaroKomiya](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KantaroKomiya.jpg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,h_314,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c1a7a85-e0f6-429b-b16c-f830503d5360_728x485.jpeg)
None of this is particularly conclusive. If Japan has been invited to join AUKUS, the announcement almost certainly wouldn’t be coming via a scoop in a mid-circulation regional paper whose readership is exceeded by that of Tokyo Sport. That also doesn’t mean Sankei got it wrong. Japan in AUKUS makes sense on multiple levels — which is why so many people on Twitter immediately accepted the news as fact — and the question of its participation seems more like one of when than whether.
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