Tim Marshall looks at Japan’s increased spending on its self-defence force
Geopolitical Hotspot
The Chinese and Russian ‘Friendship without limits’ is currently giving Japan a nervous headache.
Presidents Xi and Putin’s temporary marriage of convenience is primarily to counter US power, but a look at the map shows why it makes Tokyo jittery. A joint nuclear-bomber exercise this summer, in which Chinese and Russian planes flew over the Sea of Japan, hasn’t helped. Both countries have territorial disputes with Japan and relations, rarely more than cordial, have been going downhill for several years now. It’s no co-incidence that Japan’s defence budget is increasing.
Beijing and Tokyo both claim sovereignty over a group of uninhabited islets in the East China Sea known as the Diaoyu Islands in China and the Senkaku Islands in Japan. Tokyo’s dispute with Moscow is over the Kuril Islands – taken from Japan by Soviet troops at the end of the Second World War. In March, negotiations over the territory were terminated by Moscow in response to Japanese sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine. In the same month, ten Russian navy ships passed through the Tsugaru Strait between Japan’s main island, Honshu, and the island of Hokkaido.
And then there’s Taiwan… Japan is watching the ongoing tensions there with great interest. The island is only 110 kilometres from parts of Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture. If it fell to China, it would put Beijing in a position to threaten Japan more easily and dominate the Western Pacific. It’s an open question in Japan whether it should become involved in the event of an invasion of Taiwan. If the USA did side militarily with Taiwan, the US bases in Okinawa would be in Beijing’s sights – militarily.
Add to this a belligerent North Korea and we see why Japan is rapidly emerging from its post-Second World War pacifism and increasing defence budgets. Its 1947, USA-imposed constitution, included Article 9, which only permitted ‘self-defence forces’, but in 2014, the government approved a ‘reinterpretation’ of the text. Japan could now provide support for allies in a war. Then came a reciprocal arrangement with the USA to assist each other in the ‘area surrounding Japan’.
Japan now has what globalfirepower.com ranks as the fifth-strongest military in the world and the next defence budget, if approved in December, will be the highest to date and a tenth straight annual increase. Then the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) will go shopping for 12 F-35 stealth fighters to add to the 600 planes they already have. Four will have short take-off and vertical landing capability, to be used on the helicopter carriers the SDF are converting. These aren’t aircraft carriers you understand – Japan can’t have those under the peace terms imposed after the Second World War. They look like aircraft carriers, they carry aircraft, but they are ‘flat deck ships’.
China’s military is much larger, but the Japanese forces are extremely well trained with modern equipment and will grow in strength across the decade. Anti-cyber and space-related equipment are a big part of the budget, which will soon reach two per cent of GDP.
That figure matches the NATO target for minimum defence budgets. Japan’s commitment to do the same was agreed while ‘bearing NATO’s two per cent target in mind’ and is among the reasons Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was invited to NATO’s Madrid summit in June – the first Japanese leader to attend such a meeting. He was joined by Australia’s new prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Both countries are members of the loose naval agreement known as ‘The Quad’, along with the USA and India. Australia and Japan also closely cooperate on naval issues in a separate bilateral relationship. The invitations were a sign of NATO’s increasing interest in pushing back against Chinese influence in the Pacific and looking for partners to help it do so.
The defence debate is a question of national identity and involves looking back to the first half of the 20th century, when the Japanese military rampaged across Asia. The country is now a fully fledged stable democracy in which a small majority of people support extra defence spending. This reflects a gradual
shift in the pacifism of the post-war years that has been accelerated by the rise of China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The year-on-year rise in budgets is likely to continue, with any restraints more likely to be due to economic difficulties than political ones.
Japan is coming full circle in terms of its military prowess, but there’s a fundamental difference between the planned aggressive intent of the 1930s and the increasingly powerful but defensive posture of this decade.
