Japan’s military plan ‘proactive pacifism’

• Taking Japan a step further from its post-war pacifism, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has approved a new five-year defence plan that calls for the acquisition of drones and amphibious assault vehicles to strengthen the nation’s military as it faces the prospect of a prolonged rivalry with China over islands in the East China Sea.
• The PM has described the spending plan as “proactive pacifism”. It could be noticed that from 2013, Mr. Abe (who is building on moves by previous Prime Ministers) has started increasing the military expenditure to help offset China’s rapid military build-up and the relative decline of U.S. influence in the region.
• Under the new 10-year defence and a broader national security strategy, Japan will continue to build closer ties with the United States, whose 50,000 military personnel stationed in Japan still form the basis of Japan’s national security. But it will also acquire weapons meant to increase its own capabilities, acquisitions that would have once been unthinkable for a nation that viewed its military with suspicion after its disastrous defeat in World War II.
• Japan is trying to build a comprehensive defensive posture that can completely defend the nation. There are apprehensions over China’s attempt to alter the status quo by force in the skies and seas of the East China Sea and South China Sea and other areas based on assertions that are incompatible with the established international order.
• Political analysts say that China’s assertive stance in the dispute over the East China Sea islands has made Japan’s once proudly pacifist public more willing to accept an expanded role for the nation’s military, called the Self-Defense Forces. China’s claims in the South China Sea have also put it at odds with several countries in Southeast Asia that say they own some of the territory in question.
• The 10-year military strategy approved calls on Japan to create a more mobile military that can deal with contingencies on far-flung islands, as well as so-called gray zone conflicts that might involve small numbers of terrorists or paramilitary attackers.
• The strategy also calls on Japan to study whether it should buy or develop long-range strike capability, like cruise missiles, that would allow it to destroy a threat like a North Korean ballistic missile before it was launched.
• Japan has so far abstained from such offensive weapons in order to maintain the defensive nature of its military, whose existence already pushes the limits of a post-war constitution that bars the nation from possessing ‘land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential.’
• Mr. Abe is of the opinion to go even further by stretching the definition of self-defence to include action taken on behalf of allies under attack. For example, allowing Japan to shoot down a North Korean ballistic missile heading toward the United States. That doctrine, known as collective self-defence, has run into stiff public opposition, including from a small Buddhist political party within Mr. Abe’s governing coalition.

(According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Japan had the fifth-largest military budget in the world last year. China had the second largest, behind the United States.)