Is it true that Japan deliberately failed to broadcast the Russian Fleet's presence in the Tsugaru Strait? No, that's not true: News about Russian and Chinese military ships crossing the Tsugaru Strait had been actively broadcast and talked about in the news since its first reported sighting in 2021.
The claim appeared on TikTok (archived here) on July 23, 2023, where a man compares Russia's marine activities along the Tsugaru Strait with the Aleutian Islands Campaign in WWII. The original, extended video can be found on Instagram, where the man continues his observations about how in both the Tsugaru Incident and the Aleutian Islands Campaign, Japan didn't know what was going on until it was too late (Translated by Lead Stories Staff):
[Like the Aleutian Islands campaign] Russia is actively checking on us without us knowing, and they can pretty much fire a missile at us at any time. Japan is not doing anything, and nobody even knows about this.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jul 26 14:57:15 2023 UTC)
The Tsugaru Incident has actually been reported in Japanese media (The Ahasi Shimbun Globe) since 2021 and again in 2022, when glimpses of the Russian Fleet were seen. There is an official report of the incident by the Ministry of Defense and the Self Defense Forces that can be read online, and, since 2021 this has become a point of contention in Russo-Japanese diplomacy.
