Japanese Minister Proposes More Active Military Presence in Region.
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Japan is considering acquiring offensive weapons and drones and will assume a more active role in regional security, the country’s defense minister said Friday, giving an early glimpse of how the new conservative government could lead the nation further than ever from its postwar pacifism.
The minister, Itsunori Onodera, said Japan should consider such steps as acquiring weapons to strike bases in hostile countries and aerial drones to monitor Japan’s vast territorial waters in response to the growing capabilities of North Korea and China. He spoke after his ministry released an interim report on an overhaul of Japanese defense strategy under way by the administration of hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose Liberal Democratic Party won a decisive election victory on Sunday. The interim report is meant to start debate on the issue before deciding on final changes in the defense policy expected to be announced by the end of the year.
Mr. Abe has vowed to reverse the long decline of his nation, which was Asia’s dominant local power during much of the last century, but recently has seemed to be eclipsed by China. In addition to his economic revitalization strategy known as Abenomics, the prime minister has said he wants to change Japan’s antiwar Constitution, written by American occupiers after World War II, to allow its defense forces to become a full-fledged military. Analysts said acquiring an offensive weapon would be an important symbolic step away from the limitations placed on Japan’s armed forces by the current Constitution.
“It would be a big deal, a fundamental change in our defense philosophy,” said Narushige Michishita, director of security studies at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. “For Abe, this would be an important step toward normalizing Japan and its military.”
The changes continue a broader shift in defense strategy begun under an opposition government three years ago that ended Japan’s cold-war-era focus on fending off a Russian invasion from the north in favor of developing a more dynamic air-sea capability to defend its far-flung islands to the south. Even before Mr. Abe took office, Japan had been slowly strengthening its ability to respond to North Korean missile and nuclear tests and also China’s growing assertiveness in a territorial fight over islands in the East China Sea.
Since taking office in December, Mr. Abe has nudged Japan even further toward a more robust military. Earlier this year, his government passed the first increase in Japan’s defense budget in a decade, though the size of the gain was tiny compared with China’s double-digit growth in military spending. He has also called for strengthening Japan’s ability to respond to the continuing dispute with China over uninhabited islands, in which Chinese ships make almost daily incursions into waters claimed by Japan.
Friday’s report also contained repeated calls for finding ways to deepen cooperation with the United States, which has 50,000 soldiers and sailors in Japan. Mr. Abe has made close ties with Washington a centerpiece of his defense strategy, saying Japan must increase its military capabilities to share more of the security burden that the United States now bears in the region.
Some in Mr. Abe’s party have already been calling for strengthening Japan’s own military capabilities by developing or buying from the United States an offensive weapon like a cruise missile that could even be used to launch a pre-emptive strike on a North Korean missile before it is launched. However, on Friday, Mr. Onodera stressed that any such weapons, if actually acquired, would be used only if Japan is attacked first, and thus not represent a shift from the purely defensive nature of the Japanese military, called the Self-Defense Forces.
The caution reflects the challenge that Mr. Abe faces as he seeks to raise Japan’s military profile in a region where memories of Japan’s wartime aggression remain raw. During visits to Southeast Asian nations, Mr. Abe has tried to cast Japan as a reliable partner that can help offset the growing influence of China, which has been embroiled in heated territorial disputes with many nations in the region. On Friday in Singapore, Mr. Abe invited China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to an immediate summit meeting aimed at lowering tensions.
Still, analysts and politicians say Mr. Abe’s message of a more robust military has struck a chord among a Japanese public that feels increasingly anxious as China has appeared to challenge the long-held military dominance of the United States. This has fed growing calls for Japan to build up its own ability to defend itself, while also trying to keep the United States engaged in the region at a time when the Pentagon faces deep budget cuts.
“Over the last few years, the Japanese people’s feelings about the national security environment, and also about the Ministry of Defense and the Self-Defense Forces, have changed,” Mr. Onodera told reporters. “This has led to the current revision” that the Liberal Democrats have under way.
The anxiety over China has also led to a growing public acceptance of the Japanese military, which was long blamed for leading Japan into catastrophic defeat in World War II. In one symbolically important change, Friday’s report called for creating a single, unified command for Japan’s army, the Ground Self-Defense Forces, to improve its coordination and efficiency. This reverses a decision made after Japan’s postwar armed forces were created in 1954 to break the ground forces into several smaller regional commands, so they would be too weak and divided to hijack the civilian government, as the Imperial Army did during World War II.
In another significant step, the report called for increasing Japan’s military presence in Southeast Asia by helping those nations build their own defense capacities to respond to possible Chinese provocations. The report also called for closer military cooperation with Australia and South Korea, two other former targets of Japan’s early 20th-century aggression.
In a separate section, the report also called for building up the ability to help Japanese nationals during a terrorism or hostage crisis like the one in Algeria earlier this year, in which nearly 40 gas plant workers were killed, including 10 Japanese.
Many of changes were stated only vaguely in the report, and had to be elaborated upon by Mr. Onodera. He said Japan was considering acquiring drones like the American-made Global Hawk to keep a closer eye on its territorial waters, though he refused to name China as a possible target of surveillance. He also said Japan was considering buying tilt-rotor aircraft like the United States military’s Osprey as part of a plan to build an amphibious infantry unit similar to the Marines that can defend outlying islands.
“Japan has 6,800 islands,” Mr. Onodera said. “Any country should be able to defend itself.”
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