Author(s) Tetsuro Kobayashi and Azusa Katagiri Keywords rally ’round the flag effect, anger, anxiety, perceived threat, reactive liberal hypothesis, Japan, China Abstract This study examines the impact of China’s growing territorial ambitions on Japanese public opinion. By experimentally manipulating perceived territorial threats from China, we tested two potential mechanisms of increased support for a conservative incumbent leader in Japan. The first is the “rally ’round the flag” model, in which threats universally boost support for the leader through emotion. The second is the “reactive liberal” model, in which support from conservatives remains constant, but threatened liberals move toward supporting the conservative leader. Two survey experiments provided no support for the emotion-based “rally ’round the flag” model, but they lent support for the reactive liberal model in explaining the impact on Japanese public opinion. However, the second experiment indicated that priming with an image of the prime minister that highlights his role as the supreme commander of the national defense forces completely eliminated the gain in approval rates among liberals. Author(s) Bio Tetsuro Kobayashi (corresponding author) is an associate professor at the Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo. His current research project is centered on media politics and political communication in East Asia. His papers have been published in journals such as Political Communication, Communication Research, Human Communication Research, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Azusa Katagiri is an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research includes interstate conflict, foreign policy, and statistical and computational methods including text analysis and machine learning. He received a B.A. and LL.M. from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. Prior to attending Stanford, he worked for Japanese foreign service in Tokyo and Washington DC. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2018.21.