Japan’s aggressive military buildup, explained

US officials this week reiterated their commitment to Japan’s plan to rapidly expand defense spending amid tensions with China and North Korea after decades of limited investment after World War II. But despite the support of the US and other allies, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan to transform the Japan Self-Defense Forces into a combat force to fight threats from its neighbors. will depend on the Japanese people’s willingness to pay – and staff – the increase.

Japan’s new security posture will increase the country’s military budget by 56 percent, from about 27.47 billion yen to about 43 billion yen (an increase from approximately $215 million to $336 million). Historically, Japan has kept a tight lid on security spending due to its constitutional commitment to prevent war, but the country has a defense budget and has maintained the Japan Self-Defense Forces since 1954.

US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with their Japanese counterparts last week, adopting a new posture outlined in Japan’s new strategy. “We are modernizing our military alliance, building on Japan’s historic increase in defense spending and a new national security strategy,” Biden said in a meeting with Kishida Friday, telling reporters that the U.S. was “fully, committed, committed to the alliance.”

Blinken, at a press conference on Wednesday with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, Austin, and Japanese Defense Minister Hamada Yasukazu, promised that Japan, under the new security plan, will “take a new role” in the Indo-Pacific region and “nurture”. closer cooperation with the United States and our mutual partners,” although Blinken did not specify what the new role would be.

Kishida cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a warning about the threat Japan and other East Asian countries face from an increasingly militarized China – and also used Ukraine’s success on the battlefield and gaining support from international partners to explain Japan’s latest military posture.

Despite this week’s fanfare and the commitment of the U.S. and other partners to Japan’s military expansion, doubts remain as to whether Kishida can convince the Japanese to agree to commit the financial and human capital needed for the proposed scale.

The US and Japanese leadership have been trying for years to increase Japan’s defense spending; The US under Trump is pushing NATO allies in particular to increase defense spending to the 2 percent required under the NATO member defense spending protocol. Japan has long supported close ties with NATO, despite not being a member state; Kishida in June attended a summit of NATO allies, the first Japanese leader to do so. But increased spending and coordination does not mean a strong military, and “victory laps” as one of the experts put it, around the announcement has overshadowed the difficulties Kishida and Japan will face to pull the proposed expansion.

Japan’s historical military investment, reframed

There is no doubt that Kishida’s plan to increase defense spending is important, but to make Japan’s new posture a 180 degree turn from pacifism is a mistake. Japan does have a defense force, and its defense budget has increased every year for the past nine years; for 2023, the Kishida government approved a 26.3 percent budget increase, bringing the proposed defense spending to 6.82 trillion yen, or $51.4 billion.

As early as 2023, the government plans to buy eight F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and eight F-35B Lightning multirole fighters, part of a larger package of F-35s to be purchased from the US. Japan will also continue the development of the sixth generation fighter aircraft with the Italian and British militaries, purchase 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the US as it develops its own counterstrike missile capabilities, as well as increase the production of domestic missiles including hypersonic ones. models.

But as Tom Phuong Le, professor of politics at Pomona College told Vox, the new posture puts more emphasis on acquiring technology and weapons systems than recruiting people to serve. Especially in a cultural context where people often have good jobs when they graduate from university and there is no family or cultural connection to military service, “what is the incentive to join the military and deal with Russia, China, and North Korea when you can have a job that comfortable enough in the ordinary economy?”

There is no doubt that the security environment is becoming increasingly dangerous, in East Asia and elsewhere. Between China antagonizing Taiwan, North Korea testing missiles and nuclear warheads, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is reason for many countries – including Japan – to worry about the future and the possibility of conflict.

Those concerns have created the environment for proposed policy changes “the elites have been pushing for some time now,” according to Phillip Lipscy, director of the Japan Center for Global Studies at the University of Toronto. “The Japanese public’s willingness to engage in more muscular defense may have changed, or at least the leadership has recognized that public sentiment has changed because of the war in Ukraine.”

However, as explained by Mochizuki, the situation in which Japan will be drawn into a direct conflict with either North Korea or China is very limited; “North Korea is not going to attack out of the blue,” he said, and China’s threat to Japan is not a direct attack. “The threat […] military conflict in the Taiwan Strait and because of Japan’s geographical distance, because of the US-Japan alliance, and because US military assets in Japan seem critical to any possible US military intervention in the Taiwan crisis – because of that, If there is a Taiwan conflict, it is very likely that China will invade Japanese territory.

Political realities in Japan complicated Kishida’s plans

Kishida’s plan to increase defense spending means he will have to raise taxes – a difficult prospect given Japan’s aging population, whose care requires ever-increasing resources. Japan’s public debt compared to GDP has been the highest of the G7 countries, and has been since 1998; increasing the debt burden can tighten the Japanese economy.

Kishida himself is unpopular, affected by the scandals of his late predecessor Shinzo Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader’s alleged association with the Unification Church, Phuong Le and Mochizuki told Vox. Revelations of the link between the Church, which many in Japan see as an extortive cult, and the government after the assassination of Abe in July torpedoed Kishida’s popularity. If they decide to hold an election before the proposed tax increase, as they said they would in late December, it would likely be a referendum on the proposal. If so, “many Japanese sayings [Kishida’s] it won’t be too long,” Mochizuki told Vox.

As Mochizuki explains, “Kishida himself is quite moderate, and he comes from the faction known as Kochikai, which is more moderate on defense issues, more open to stable relations with China, and the foreign minister, Hayashi, has the same view.” However, Kishida’s unpopularity has pushed him and Hayashi towards the more hawkish elements of the LDP. “He really agrees with the defensive side,” Mochizuki said.

“What Kishida did was let Biden hug him,” Mochizuki said.

That political environment, combined with pressure from the US and legitimate regional threats “makes it more likely that Japan will take bigger steps,” Phuong Le said. And although U.S. officials have shown a strong commitment to the U.S.-Japan alliance this week, plans for the Kishida administration to implement the proposed changes are realistic, Phuong Le said.

“Both sides don’t talk about it because they don’t have a solution.”