Asia-Pacific

Tokyo Letter: Japan tools up for conflict in Asia

Defence strategists in Japan are increasingly explicit about the challenge posed by China

A man holding a placard reading 'Stop the military expansion!' participates in a protest in Tokyo against an increase in military spending announced by Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida. Photograph: Franck Robichon/EPA

David McNeill's face
David McNeill in Tokyo
Thu Dec 22 2022 - 16:00

It has become a cliché to say that we live in an increasingly unstable world, and one of the most striking illustrations of that has come from Japan.

Last Friday, prime minister Fumio Kishida announced a dramatic hike in military spending of ¥43 trillion yen – almost €300 billion.

After decades of holding the military budget to roughly one per cent of GDP, the government says it wants to double this to two per cent by 2027.

Assuming it can be paid for, the hike would put Japan’s spending on defence roughly in line with Nato countries, though still far below the United States and China.

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Among the big-ticket items reportedly tagged in the new national security strategy are hundreds of US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving Japan potential strike capability against enemy missile bases.

Japan’s flagship liberal daily, the Asahi Shimbun, said this effectively means that Kishida is abandoning a key plank of Japan’s 1947 “pacifist” constitution – its exclusively defensive posture. This posture is now in “name only”, said the paper.

The shift by Kishida concedes ground to hawks within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), notably former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who pushed for strike capability, a bigger military budget and hosting of nuclear weapons before he was assassinated in July.

Japans prime minister Fumio Kishida gives a press conference in Tokyo on December 16th in which he announced a dramatic hike in military spending. Photograph: David Mareuil/AFP via Getty Images

Defence strategists in Japan are increasingly explicit about China, which Kishida’s government describes as “the greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan”.

One potential flashpoint is the Senkakus in the East China Sea, a small clump of uninhabited islands (known as Diaoyu in China), which Japan administers but China claims.

Beijing has urged Kishida to avoid confrontation. “Hyping up the ‘China threat’ to find an excuse for its military buildup is doomed to fail,” warned Wang Wenbin, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, last week.

Yet, actions are likely to speak louder than words. Many in Japan have been taken aback by the speed at which Beijing has crushed civil society in Hong Kong.

Japanese pundits regularly predict that with the former British colony brought to heel, Beijing will turn its attention to “renegade province” Taiwan, less than 120km off Japan’s Yonaguni island.

Okinawa, which administers Yonaguni, is home to most of the United States’s military bases in Japan – the two allies are building a huge new offshore air base on Okinawa’s main island.

Chinese hawks accuse the US of squaring up for conflict over Taiwan, using Japan as its Asian proxy. In August, they reacted furiously when US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-level American politician to visit Taiwan in 25 years.

During days of retaliatory live-fire drills in waters around Taiwan, five Chinese missiles fell in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has stoked concerns that a Chinese gamble on Taiwan is more likely. Three-quarters of Japanese who replied to a survey after the invasion began said it raised the possibility of a spillover in Japan’s neighbourhood.

Most analysts believe that the chance of China trying to take Taiwan by force, however, is low – and falling the more that war in Ukraine drags on. “The risks for China are just too high,” said Dennis Cutler Blair, a former commander in chief of the US Pacific Command.

Blair recently told an audience in Tokyo that Russia had to go about only 40km on land to take Ukraine – “and couldn’t do it”. “China has to cross often stormy seas and attempt Normandy-style landings into defences which have been preparing for 70 years now.”

Yet, the dangers of an Asian arms race are real. Last week, the Global Times, an English-language Chinese newspaper, said Japan’s “radical and irrational” behavior was increasing the risk of conflict.

“If you treat China as a ‘threat’, you actually become a ‘threat’ to China, and in turn China will really become a ‘threat’ to you. Japan is creating a crazy vicious circle,” warned an editorial.

Kishida seems in no mood to listen to such finger wagging from a government he accuses of forcibly changing the status quo in east Asia. “I have long said the world is at a historic crossroads,” he said last Friday.

Changes in the balance of global power means that “conflicts between countries in the international community, conflicts between countries and open competition over national interests have become more apparent”, he said.

The question is whether Japan’s hike in military spending deters open conflict – or makes it more likely.