Why Japan believes a change in approach is needed

Daniel DePetris, Tribune News Service

Japan isn’t known for being an aggressive country in the world of foreign affairs. Successive Japanese governments have taken pains to emphasize their peacelike nature, a direct consequence of Tokyo finding itself on the losing side of the most horrific war of the 20th century. Japan’s constitution renounces the use of force as a “means of settling international disputes,” and at $54 billion as of last year, its defense budget is extremely modest compared with its $4.9 trillion economy.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, however, no longer believes Tokyo’s traditional defence policy and military outlays are sufficient. The security dynamics in East Asia today are much different and arguably more threatening to Japan than they were in the decades after World War II, even when one accounts for the fact that Tokyo has a US security guarantee and about 55,000 US troops are stationed in Japanese territory. Kishida wants Japan’s defence budget to double over the next five years, a massive investment for a country with the highest ratio of debt to gross domestic product in the developed world.

Even so, the international security environment in Japan’s neighbourhood is pushing policymakers and lawmakers to support what would ordinarily be off the table. Japanese officials normally reluctant to weigh in on some of the region’s most controversial security disputes are now doing so far more liberally. Koichi Hagiuda, chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, not only criticized China for its increasing belligerence over Taiwan but did so during a trip to the self-governed island. While one has to be cautious in extrapolating too much from a single event, Hagiuda’s comments at least suggest that some in Tokyo’s policy elite are no longer content with sitting back and quietly registering their disapproval. Warning China of destabilizing what has been a relatively calm and orderly balance of power between Asia’s great powers is now deemed more important than keeping friction at a minimum.

It’s understandable why Japan believes a change in approach is needed. Today’s China is not the China of the 1970s or even the China of the 1990s, when it was still considered a middle power with a subpar military capability and a significant poverty problem. Notwithstanding the slower economic growth and socioeconomic problems associated with the coronavirus, the China of 2022 is on its way toward becoming Asia’s preeminent military and economic power.

At the turn of this century, Beijing’s defense budget clocked in at slightly more than $22 billion; in 2020, that figure reached $252 billion, an 11-fold increase. The People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, as the Chinese military is formally named, has invested a significant sum of that money toward building its navy, bolstering its missile capacity (China has the world’s largest stockpile of intermediate-range ballistic missiles) and researching the next generation of weapons technology.

The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping also isn’t afraid to demonstrate some of those capabilities when the situation demands it. The world saw this most recently in August, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi overrode Biden administration concerns and proceeded with a visit to Taiwan. After Pelosi’s trip, the PLA launched a multiday military exercise, simulating a blockade of Taiwan, sending dozens of aircraft across the de facto boundary separating China and Taiwan’s airspace, and firing missiles into the sky — one of which landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Nobody is arguing the PLA is preparing for an invasion of Japanese territory, of course. But to the Japanese government, the exercises over the summer were confirmation that Tokyo needed to improve its own defense capacity and diversify its security partnerships with states that share the same concerns about Chinese power.