TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The policy chief of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Hagiuda Koichi, is planning to visit Taiwan during the weekend, reports said Thursday (Dec. 8).

Hagiuda, 59, serves as chairman of the party’s Policy Research Council, and attended Taiwan’s Double Ten National Day reception in Tokyo last October, the Liberty Times reported.

He was scheduled to arrive in Taiwan Saturday (Dec. 10) and meet with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) during his stay. He will also address a seminar discussing 50 years of unofficial relations between Japan and Taiwan.

In an interview with Nikkei, Hagiuda emphasized the need for high-level contact between the two countries, since they faced similar threats. Earlier Thursday, former Japanese Vice Defense Minister Nakayama Yasuhide said in Taipei that Taiwan needed to intensify its cooperation with other countries in new types of warfare related to space, the Internet, and electromagnetic fields.

Hagiuda told the interviewer about his numerous visits to Taipei, and that one of his first tasks during his career in the LDP was the organization of a trip for over a hundred local Japanese politicians to Taiwan.

He voiced the hope that China would not try and use military force to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, but if it happened, Japan would suffer a severe shock, so there was a need for Taiwan, Japan, and the United States to increase their cooperation. Hagiuda referred to the expression “a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency” used by late Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, saying that the Taiwan emergency would turn out to be a groundless worry.