China threat spurs Japan to expand military presence
Date December 1, 2012
Campaign trail ... the Japan Restoration Party of Shintaro Ishihara, left, and Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto, right, is lagging in the polls. Photo: AFP
TOKYO: After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, pacifist Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries' defences to counter a rising China.
Already this year Japan crossed a little-noted threshold by providing its first military aid abroad since the end of World War II, approving a 160 million yen ($1.86 million) package for its military engineers to train troops in Cambodia and East Timor in disaster relief and skills such as road building.
Japanese warships have not only conducted joint exercises in the Pacific and Asia, but have also begun making regular port visits to countries long fearful of a resurgence of Japan's military.
And after stepping up civilian aid programs to train and equip the coast guards of other nations, Japanese defence officials and analysts say Japan could soon reach another milestone: beginning regional sales of military hardware such as seaplanes, and perhaps eventually the stealthy diesel-powered submarines considered well suited to the shallow waters where China is making increasingly assertive territorial claims.
Those steps represent a significant shift for Japan, which had resisted calls from the US to become a regional power. The country's quiet resolve to edge past that reluctance comes as the US and China are staking their own claims to power in Asia, and as jitters over China's ambitions appear to be softening bitterness towards Japan among some south-east Asian countries trampled last century in its quest for colonial domination.
The driver for Japan's shifting national security strategy is its tense dispute with China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that is feeding Japanese anxiety that their country's relative decline - and the financial struggles of their traditional protector, the US - are leaving them increasingly vulnerable.
''During the Cold War, all Japan had to do was follow the US,'' said Keiro Kitagami, a security adviser to the Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda. ''With China, it's different. Japan has to take a stand on its own.''
Japan's moves do not mean it might transform its military, which serves a purely defensive role, into an offensive force anytime soon. The public has resisted past efforts by some politicians to revamp Japan's pacifist constitution, and the nation's vast debt will limit how much military aid it can extend.
But attitudes in Japan are evolving as China continues its double-digit annual growth in military spending and asserts that it should be in charge of the islands Japan claims as well as vast areas of the South China Sea claimed by various south-east Asian nations.
Japanese leaders have met the Chinese challenge over the islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China with an uncharacteristic willingness to push back, and polls show the public is increasingly in agreement. Both major political parties are also talking openly about instituting a more flexible reading of the constitution that would allow Japan to come to the defence of allies - shooting down any North Korean missile headed for the US, for instance - blurring the line between an offensive and defensive force.
''We want to build our own coalition of the willing in Asia to prevent China from just running over us,'' said Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University in Tokyo. Or, as the Vice-Minister of Defence, Akihisa Nagashima, said: ''We cannot just allow Japan to go into quiet decline.''
The US has generally welcomed such efforts by Japan, which are in line with its own strategy of building up Asian nations militarily so they can stand their ground against China, as well as expanding the American military presence in the region.
China, which itself suffered in imperial Japan's 20th-century territorial grabs, has reacted with warnings that Japan is trying to overturn the outcome of World War II by staging a military comeback. At a defence conference in Melbourne in October, Lieutenant General Ren Haiquan of China warned Australia against allying more closely with what he called a ''fascist'' nation that once bombed Darwin.
However, in a measure of the geopolitical changes taking place in the region, concerns about any resurgent Japanese militarism appear to be fading in some countries embroiled in their own territorial disputes with China, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, the scene of fierce fighting during the war.
Analysts in the region said their countries welcomed, and sometimes invited, Japan's help.
''We have already put aside our nightmares of World War II because of the threat posed by China,'' said Rommel Banlaoi, a security expert at the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research in Manila.
On a recent morning, 22 coast guard officials from a dozen Asian and African nations joined a training cruise around Tokyo Bay aboard a sleek Japanese coast guard cutter. Before the cutter left port, the foreign contingent and the Japanese crew stood at attention on deck facing each other, then bowed deeply.
''Japan is joining the United States and Australia in helping us face China,'' said Mark Lim, an administrative officer from the Philippine Coast Guard who joined the cruise.
Indeed, Japan is widely viewed as the only nation in the region with a navy powerful enough to check China. Although Japan's defence spending has been shrinking, the military budget is, by many measures, the sixth largest in the world.
The Japanese navy took a big step towards opening up in 2009, when it held a joint military drill with Australia, its first such exercise with a nation besides the US.
