Japan

[Crafty_Dog]

Summary

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda recently visited the island of Okinawa, where the issue of relocating U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma has created notable controversy. Noda's visit preceded a two-day meeting between Japanese and U.S. officials in Tokyo over the issue. Washington's relocation plan has prompted strong opposition, hindering its implementation. This matter has helped keep U.S.-Japanese relations cooled, but deeper geopolitical imperatives and shared interests guarantee that the alliance between Tokyo and Washington will remain strong.

Analysis

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda made his first official visit to the island province of Okinawa the weekend of Feb. 25-27. The visit came ahead of a two-day meeting between Japanese and U.S. officials about the fate of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which is currently located in Okinawa and set for relocation within the province. The plans to relocate the base have fueled a powerful controversy -- Okinawans vocally oppose both the continued presence of Futenma in its current location and the 2006 U.S.-Japanese agreement calling for the base to be moved to a more rural location. This opposition is delaying the execution of the 2006 agreement, and officials from both countries are in negotiations to try to overcome this impasse.

The episode comes during a stalled period in U.S.-Japanese relations. At least six years of frequently changing Japanese Cabinets have made it difficult to move forward with the planned U.S. realignment of forces and with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement -- two strategic parts of Washington's re-engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. Though the Futenma issue has become problematic, the United States and Japan have too many shared interests and geopolitical imperatives for their alliance to crumble.

Okinawa's Importance

Okinawa, which saw the last major World War II battle in the Pacific theater, was a de facto U.S. protectorate for almost 30 years. Its strategic location near Taiwan, the Chinese mainland, the Korean Peninsula and Japan made Okinawa important in U.S. forward deployment of forces in the western rim of the Pacific Basin. The island was a regional hub for U.S. armed forces in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, giving the United States a logistical base from which to project air power over the East and South China seas.

However, since the adoption of Japan's pacifist Constitution, there has been local opposition to military use of the province, especially since the number of U.S. bases it hosts is disproportionate to its size (Okinawa is 1 percent of Japanese territory but hosts 70 percent of the bases in the country that are used exclusively by the United States). Since Okinawa returned to Japanese rule in 1972, opposition to U.S. bases on the island has increased.

Controversy and Current Developments

Partly as a response to local concerns, but also with the broader goal of updating the strategic alignment of U.S. forces in the region, the Japanese and U.S. governments reached an agreement in 2006 that would send approximately 8,000 Marines of the III Marine Expeditionary Force stationed in Okinawa to Guam. According to the agreement, the transfer would be finalized by 2014. But the agreement had an important condition: Japan would be responsible (logistically and financially) for transferring Futenma's equipment and facilities from Ginowan City to its new location in Henoko Point, a more rural part of northern Okinawa. Opposition to this agreement has delayed the relocation.

The main point of contention is that the original relocation plan called for the construction of an offshore runway that would sit atop a coral reef -- the home of the dugong, an endangered marine mammal. Opposition has come not only from locals concerned for their natural environment (and in some cases livelihood), but also from outside environmentalist, left-wing and pacifist groups calling for a total U.S. withdrawal from Okinawa. Local resistance became particularly strong after successive Democratic Party of Japan Cabinets were seen as mishandling the issue.

Okinawan Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima, who holds de facto veto power over the decision, is pressuring the central government to move the Futenma base out of the province, though there are not many other places where the base could feasibly go. Futenma is not a stand-alone facility -- it is linked to the network of U.S. facilities elsewhere in the region, particularly the other Marine bases in Okinawa (including Camps Courtney, Foster, Hansen, Lester, Kinser and Schwab) -- making relocation outside of the province tactically problematic for Washington. Moreover, very few governors of other provinces seem willing to host the base, which leaves Henoko as the only viable option.

The U.S.-Japanese Alliance

In February, U.S. and Japanese officials engaged in negotiations about revisions to the 2006 agreement. The first revision announced stated that the United States will move only approximately 4,700 Marines to Guam, with the remaining 3,300 being sent to different Asia-Pacific locations on a rotational basis. Moreover, the proposed move will be detached from the Futenma part of the agreement, meaning it will take place regardless of further delays in the base's relocation. Negotiations have continued in what Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba called a "flexible manner," which indicates that more changes can be expected.

The outcome of this issue is uncertain, and although the Noda Cabinet has declared the U.S.-Japanese alliance the cornerstone of its foreign policy, so far the Cabinet has not been able to dispel the general sense of stagnation and frustration in the relationship. Despite the seeming intractability of this issue, it is not likely to lead to an unraveling of the U.S.-Japanese alliance, which is governed by many underlying regional strategic imperatives.

First, the United States wants to distribute its forces in a manner that is more sustainable politically and economically, which means spreading its forces more broadly across multiple countries. Moreover, the need to make the U.S. presence in the region resilient against both political and military threats dictates the need to distribute U.S. forces evenly throughout several countries. This likely will mean an eventual reduction in the area occupied by U.S. bases in Okinawa and the number of forces based there.

Second, although Japan is seeking to improve its relationships with its Asian neighbors (particularly China), tensions within the region tie Japanese interests to those of the United States. The divergent Japanese and Chinese geographic and economic imperatives in the region (such as control over disputed territories and resources) and historical rivalry give Tokyo reason to continue its close cooperation with Washington. More importantly, Japan's desire to increase its influence in the region both economically and militarily coincides with Washington's plans for Tokyo to play a greater role in the United States' Asia-Pacific re-engagement.

Third, Japan faces a continued threat from a seemingly erratic North Korean regime and, more important, from the ongoing growth of China's navy and repeated incursions of both civilian and military Chinese vessels into territory that Japan either claims or controls. China's strategic imperative to control its "first island chain," of which the southern archipelago of Okinawa and Taiwan are a part, emphasizes the value of the U.S.-Japanese alliance and the basing of forces in Okinawa. Japan benefits from the deterrent power of an armed U.S. presence, while the United States gains the capability to project its power into the Far East from bases in Japan. The U.S. presence is particularly important given Japan's traditional reluctance to engage in military ventures that could raise the ire of neighboring countries that harbor deep anti-Japanese sentiments.

Potential Developments

Though political inertia in Japan's central government and strong opposition in Okinawa are complicating the Futenma issue, the relocation controversy is not insurmountable. Most local citizens are opposed to the original relocation plan mainly because the new location would involve building offshore, which would damage the environment and the livelihoods of local fishermen. Changes in the plan could make relocation more palatable to the locals, especially since the base's presence could help reactivate the local economy. This would be an important step, since local politicians' opposition to the relocation plan stems more from political need than personal opinion. If the locals agree to it, then provincial and municipal officials could agree to it as well.

Although the Futenma controversy might seem like a hindrance to U.S. forces' capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region, other regional hubs in Japan -- such as the Kadena and Misawa military facilities -- will still give the United States robust power projection capabilities, even if Futenma ceases to provide basing for Marine air assets in Okinawa. Moreover, current political dynamics could lead this issue to evolve in such a way that the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) assumes more responsibility for national and regional security. The JSDF is gradually moving toward greater involvement in security matters outside Japan's immediate vicinity. Furthermore, Chinese incursions into waters claimed by Japan have sparked a domestic debate on whether Japanese security services, such as the Coast Guard, should have broader authority. This trend would only grow if the United States seems to have less of a presence in the area because of a continued impasse over Futenma. (Similar trends have emerged in Taiwan, where a potential reduction of the U.S. presence in Okinawa is seen as necessitating stronger, independent Taiwanese defense capabilities.)

The Futenma controversy does not pose a long-term threat to the U.S.-Japanese alliance, nor does the current Japanese political landscape. Though there is a sense that the U.S.-Japanese relationship has stalled because of difficult issues like domestic resistance to the Okinawa bases and the TPP, regional dynamics and more than half a century of close relations will help ensure the endurance of the security alliance between Tokyo and Washington.

[Crafty_Dog]

Summary

 
TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images

A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force helicopter flies beside a Japanese destroyer

As an island nation, Japan is by necessity a maritime power. For the last half-century, its maritime strategy has been primarily mercantile in nature. But as both China and the United States expand their naval presence in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan will increasingly seek to reinforce its commercial, territorial and energy interests through a more proactive, open maritime military strategy.



Analysis

Japan comprises four major islands and roughly 6,800 minor ones. For as long as it has been a unified political entity, Japan has been a maritime nation, though it has not always been a maritime power.

The arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in the second half of the 19th century catalyzed a group of forward-looking oligarchs under the Meiji emperor to radically reform Japanese military practices; only then did Japan emerge as a capable naval power. As a resource-impoverished island nation undergoing modernization, Japan possessed a vibrant maritime culture and a strong need to acquire the energy and raw materials it lacked at home. These qualities, along with Meiji leaders' insecurity and sense of purpose over Japan's changing position in Asian affairs, fueled the nation's drive toward empire.

In the power vacuum left by China's crumbling Qing dynasty, the Japanese Empire grew quickly. In 40 years starting in 1868, Japan built an industrial base and a fleet to rival those of most European empires. In 1905, the Imperial Japanese navy defeated the Russian navy, and by 1942 the Japanese Empire included nearly all of East and Southeast Asia. Japan's core imperative, to control the Asia-Pacific maritime sphere, began to clash with the United States' need for dominance in the Pacific Ocean. Conflict was inevitable unless one country or the other ceded its claim to control maritime flows in East Asia. World War II decided the balance of power in the Western Pacific, forcing Tokyo to relinquish the Japanese Empire's military maritime strategy and shift toward a post-war mercantilist maritime strategy.

Japan's Post-War Strategy
After World War II, Japanese leaders moved quickly to embed Tokyo firmly within the United States' emerging Cold War security framework in East Asia. In making itself crucial to the United States' Asia-Pacific strategy, Japan laid the foundation for an industrial resurgence.

Taking advantage of the U.S.-imposed constitutional ban on military activity, Japan instead relied on support from and favorable trade policies with the United States to rebuild itself as Asia's key economic buffer against Soviet and Chinese communism. On Washington's prodding, Japan gradually rebuilt its navy, with its new name -- the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force -- reflecting its ostensible defensive orientation. During the Cold War, these forces operated fully within America's security framework for the Asia-Pacific region. Japan remained a maritime power, but its influence was built on growing economic might and on its increasing importance as Asia's merchant power.

The fall of the Soviet Union triggered a massive shift in the geopolitical dynamics of East Asia and affected Japan profoundly. First, it removed Washington's incentive to maintain preferential trade conditions with Tokyo. Decreased attention from Washington was one factor that triggered Japan's "Lost Decade." Second, throughout the 1990s and especially after 2001, the United States dramatically reoriented its foreign policy focus toward the Middle East, withdrawing much of its military presence from East Asia. With its primary patron shifting its attention elsewhere, Japan gradually ceded influence in East and Southeast Asia to China, the rising regional power. This process coincided with Tokyo's realization, especially after the 1996 Shining Path incident in Peru, that it could no longer rely on the U.S. Navy to protect its economic and political interests abroad.

Over the fifteen years that followed, Japanese efforts to revive economic growth moved alongside a quiet but steady build-up of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force -- not only as a key component in a U.S. maritime strategy increasingly focused on containing China, but also as an independent national security force. This process has proceeded apace despite some domestic criticism for its perceived noncompliance with Japan's "pacifist" constitution. For Japan, every step toward normalizing the Self-Defense Force reflects Tokyo's deeper need to secure and expand its sphere of influence and its access to resources in an increasingly competitive, crowded environment.

Contemporary Japan's Maritime Strategy
Today, Japan's maritime strategy is determined by its security and economic needs and their proximity to the core Japanese islands. Tokyo's geopolitical environment unfolds in concentric circles moving outward from these islands.


.The first ring includes the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, parts of the Yellow Sea and the North Pacific Ocean. This is Japan's immediate sphere of influence, and historically has been the source of or gateway for existential threats to the islands. Tokyo's interests here are shaped primarily by two factors. One is the need to protect the islands themselves from any form of attack, and to guarantee security for the immediate shipping lanes that carry resources and raw materials into the country. Another is Tokyo's growing desire to explore for undersea energy and mineral resources in its immediate territorial waters, and the resulting need to provide security for those assets.

The East China Sea is at the core of Japan's maritime strategy. It brings Tokyo into contact with most of its major near- and long-term strategic threats, from North Korea to China, South Korea, Taiwan and even the United States. Japan is active in the other seas of the first ring, especially the Sea of Japan, where it faces North Korea, but its long-term strategic interests center on the East China Sea and on China. While North Korea does represent a threat to Tokyo, it is not an existential threat. China and to a lesser extent South Korea and Russia pose significant threats, especially to Japan's underwater energy and mineral assets in the region. The ongoing low-level tensions over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu Islands in China) and the Takeshima islets  (known as the Dokdo islets in Korea) manifest the underlying geopolitical dynamic that governs the East China Sea and Sea of Japan.

The next concentric ring centers on the South China Sea. About 88 percent of the goods that reach Japan pass through this sea first. Japan has significant bilateral trade relationships throughout the region, and much of its industrial base now sits in countries that border the South China Sea. Moreover, much of the sea is claimed by Tokyo's greatest strategic threat: China. Japan has a direct interest in making sure that China does not gain a naval and commercial monopoly in the region -- either through overwhelming maritime power, energy exploration, trade or diplomatic influence. Tokyo has stepped up its naval relationships with countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, even as it works to maintain a cordial political and economic relationship with Beijing.

The third concentric ring includes the larger Pacific Rim, from Hokkaido to the Arabian Peninsula and south to Australia. These represent the real limits of Japan's strategic environment. While Tokyo is actively working to enhance long-range naval capabilities, as seen most clearly in its participation in counterpiracy exercises off the Somali coast, it is not yet building the capacity to sustain significant, protracted global force projection. While the Maritime Self-Defense Force possesses highly sophisticated diesel-electric submarine, anti-submarine, and ballistic-missile defense systems, it does not have a single fleet aircraft carrier, not to mention the vessels required to refuel and resupply its fleet when operating far from the home islands. For now, Japan's maritime expansion is focused on providing immediate territorial security, protecting proximate assets and supply lines and guarding against China's aggressive maritime push.

The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force eventually may prove to be less defensive in orientation than its name suggests. China's economic, political and naval expansion will probably continue to be a threat for at least a decade, but it also hinges on Beijing's ability to maintain internal stability. If China were to suffer a political crisis or economic collapse that derailed its rise, Japan would have an opportunity to reassert itself as the economic and military hegemon in the Asia-Pacific region. This could dramatically alter its place within the U.S. security framework and even bring it into conflict with the United States.


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Read more: Japan's Maritime Strategy | Stratfor

[Russ]

Japan has a modern Naval force with a lot of ships and interaction with US Naval Operations in the Pacific.  I would not be surprised if they step up their activities in the region to assert their power in the face of an increasing Chinese threat, a threat that has not yet matured in terms of its physical assets (i.e.. air craft carriers).

[Crafty_Dog]

Sounds like a good thing to me!

I have no idea what Stratfor is talking about in its last line.

[Russ]

Stratfor's policy on China is that its domestic stability in terms of rural uprising and political dissent will dictate whether or not it can successfully assert itself internationally.

This is wishful thinking on Stratfor's part, but has a historical basis in CHinese society.

China has a ton of subs that spreads its sea coverage, but not an effective long range fleet yet.  However, that is changing fast.

Japan will need to assert itself sooner rather than later.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/japan-shifting-further-away-from-pacifism.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130402&_r=0

[Crafty_Dog]

Japanese Nationalism and Shifting Policies
April 24, 2013 | 0601 GMT
Stratfor

The dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands still risks triggering trade tensions, boycotts and confrontations at sea. Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, warned Tuesday that his country would use force to repel any Chinese nationals who landed on the disputed islands. Abe's statement was just one headline amid a flurry of activity surrounding this perennial source of strain on Sino-Japanese relations. On Tuesday, the Japanese Coast Guard prevented Japanese protesters from a group known as Ganbare Nippon from landing on the islands, around which they were sailing as a way of expressing Japanese sovereignty. Eight Chinese patrol vessels also wound their way through the islands, prompting Abe's warning. Japanese and Chinese diplomats and ministers swiftly filed complaints.
 


 
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, 168 lawmakers paid homage to those who died in the service of the Japanese Empire. The action stirred controversy especially because it took place at the Yasukuni Shrine, a site that commemorates, among many others, 14 Japanese soldiers convicted of war crimes at the end of World War II. This visit was reportedly the largest since 1989 -- though comparable to a visit in 2005 that triggered a period of rough Sino-Japanese relations that Abe himself helped to smooth over.
 
Visits by Japanese citizens to Yasukuni always spark outcries from those who suffered under Japanese occupation during the war, especially Korean and Chinese citizens. The visits are also interpreted as indications of a broader Japanese refusal to recognize the misdeeds of the past. South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung Se has already canceled a scheduled trip to Japan as a result of the latest visit.
 
Japanese nationalism has been a prominent topic since the country's December elections, not only because the Liberal Democratic Party -- the dominant party in postwar history -- regained the lower house, but also because the Japan Restoration Party -- an alliance of nationalists led by a few popular governors in major cities -- won more than 50 seats, putting unprecedented pressure on the right wing. Thus, while the ruling party is following a time-tested tactic in stirring up national passions, it now must win back political turf that it once considered its own.
 
The ruling party has its sights set on the upper house elections in July, when it hopes to regain total control of the legislature. The party has therefore gone to great lengths to distance itself from the perception that it is a collection of elderly lifelong politicians. The Liberal Democratic Party hopes to appear bold and unconventional by rolling out an economic revitalization plan and showing unparalleled devotion to its country. So far the effort has succeeded, especially on the economic front by means of new fiscal stimulus and redoubled monetary easing.
 
Nevertheless, the emergence of a popular nationalism beyond the party's control points to a development far more significant than a mere turning of the political cycle. Japan's response to population decline and to the economic crisis of the early 1990s saw the government borrow funds to support the country's aging population and prevent retrenchment in the corporate sector; hence the buildup in debt that surpasses all other rich countries.
 
Since the early 2000s, a range of factors have challenged this strategy. Some of these factors relate to increased geopolitical competition -- from China's rise and Russia's resurgence to economic competition from the likes of South Korea. Japan has also dealt with a drop in global demand for Japanese goods after 2008, a domestic political shakeup in 2009, and a massive earthquake and nuclear crisis in 2011. Popular nationalism has thus emerged as a response to two decades of socioeconomic malaise and a shifting international environment. This trend is now forcing the traditionally dominant party and bureaucracy to revise old-fashioned policies.
 
The political elite, regardless of party, has the unenviable task of revising policies while challenged by population decline. It must do so while moving within the confines of a political model focused on preserving wealth rather than pursuing growth and of an increasingly threatening geopolitical environment. In this context, it is notable that there is one area in which the new government has avoided harping on nationalist themes: Russia. Japan's history of enmity with Russia goes back to the 1904 war. The two countries never signed a peace treaty at the end of World War II, and Japan continues to claim the Russian-controlled Kuril Islands.
 
However, learning from the previous administration's botched attempt to win back the islands, the Liberal Democratic Party has decided to try a different tack and negotiate with the Russians on investment and trade, with a special focus on energy. Japan needs to contain energy costs as part of its attempts to reinvigorate growth, and Russia is looking at Pacific markets as a destination for its energy exports.
 
Abe and a large business delegation will head to Moscow in the coming days. The two still have deep differences and cannot normalize relations overnight, but Japan has at least signaled a willingness to become more pragmatic.
.

Read more: Japanese Nationalism and Shifting Policies | Stratfor

[DougMacG]

I recall the same publication, WSJ editorial page, writing at the beginning of this 20 year funk that what Japan needed was bold economic reforms and what Japan's political system was totally incapable of was bold reform, hence the 20 years of stagnation.  One thing that makes the current situation more interesting is the trouble in China, since China only very recently surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy (using cooked books).  Also interesting to me is that Japan lowered its corporate income tax rate, a pro-growth move, making the US rate the highest in the developed world.

The Prime Minister's party and allies just won a majority in the upper house, in addition to the lower house, now they need to carry out unspecified reforms that he promised.  They already are doing the easy part, more spending and monetary devaluation - dubious strategies.

The third leg is deregulation.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323829104578620142466558934.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

"Now the question is how strongly Mr. Abe will move on what he calls the "third arrow" of Japanese reform. These include deregulatory changes that go beyond the free-lunch appeal of more spending and easy money. That means opening up Japan's economy to more competition with free trade, making it easier to fire and thus also hire workers, busting up domestic cartels such as in retailing, reforming laws on land use to allow more development, and cutting corporate taxes.  Mr. Abe was circumspect on most of these fronts during the campaign, no doubt because they challenge powerful domestic constituencies. One exception was Mr. Abe's endorsement of Japan's entry into the trans-Pacific free trade talks, for which he now has a clear mandate. Such a trade opening could be precisely the foreign shock Japan needs to stimulate more domestic animal spirits. That assumes Mr. Abe won't now try to limit how far the pact goes on agriculture, among other protected parts of Japan's economy. He should consider trade to be his political ally in driving reform."

[Crafty_Dog]

A 'Collective' U.S.-Japan Defense
Tokyo steps into Asia's security breach to counter rising China.
Feb. 5, 2014 10:20 a.m. ET

U.S. and Chinese officials continue to spar over China's recent declaration of a huge new air-defense zone, which makes even more important Shinzo Abe's move to reinterpret the Japanese constitution and end a 67-year ban on collective self-defense. The Japanese Prime Minister has said he'll follow the recommendations of a government panel due to report in April, and last week the panel signaled it will recommend a new gloss on the pacifist constitution written by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's aides after World War II.

So what is collective self-defense and why does it matter? Under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, American forces are supposed to aid Japan if it is attacked. But the obligation doesn't go the other way. Because of the way the constitution's Article 9 is interpreted now, Japanese forces could do nothing to help the U.S. if it were under attack. That's especially relevant given North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. If a nuclear-tipped missile flew over Japan toward the U.S., Japan's warships equipped with missile interceptors would have to let it pass.

The two countries are now revising their bilateral defense guidelines, and past revisions have expanded Japan's role in support of U.S. operations in a regional crisis. However, these are make-shift arrangements, and the U.S. has in the past urged Japan to move toward collective self-defense to end these difficulties.

The principle that democracies should band together to face the threat of dictatorships is a linchpin of the post-World War II world order. In Europe, the NATO was founded on this idea to deter the Soviet Union. In Asia, by contrast, the U.S. was able to keep the peace and contain the spread of communism through bilateral treaties and coalitions of the willing. Until now. The rise of China is putting stress on this Pax Americana, as the Obama Administration's "pivot" implicitly acknowledges. Washington now needs its allies to work cooperatively, not merely as spokes on a security wheel.

Asia lacks an equivalent of the France-Germany entente at the heart of Europe, around which economic and security organizations can grow. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is the closest Asia has now, but Asean is ineffectual at the best of times. A coalition of democracies could be a more effective counterweight to China's encroaching militarism.

That is still some way off, but in the meantime Japan can fill the breach if it can navigate the tricky politics. The majority of the Japanese public is against collective self-defense, and Mr. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party governs in coalition with the pacifist New Komeito Party. While Mr. Abe probably can get the votes, New Komeito might then leave the government. One possible scenario is a reorganization of Japan's parties in which right-of-center elements in the opposition come over to the LDP.

Mr. Abe's moves may also provoke a regional backlash, at least at first. His Dec. 26 visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where class A war criminals are honored, and statements by other officials denying war atrocities raise suspicions that Japan's militarist ghosts haven't been exorcised. South Koreans harbor many grudges for Japan's colonial rule, and Seoul's ties to Beijing are especially strong.

A new constitutional interpretation wouldn't entirely remove the post-war limits on Japan's armed forces, and Mr. Abe also wants to pursue an amendment. While Beijing will kick up a fuss, China's leaders might consider that their own actions opened the door. If they keep trying to change the status quo by force in the disputed Senkaku Islands and the South China Sea, Mr. Abe or his successor may cut Article 9 altogether.

Mr. Abe deserves praise for trying to make Japan into a normal nation that can play a leadership role in Asia. Tokyo has contributed to peace and made amends for past behavior over the last seven decades. It's time Japan carries its weight keeping its neighborhood safe for democracy.

[Crafty_Dog]

TOKYO — A series of defiantly nationalistic comments, including remarks critical of the United States, by close political associates of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led analysts to warn of a growing chill between his right-wing government and the Obama administration, which views Japan as a linchpin of its strategic pivot to Asia.

Rebuttals from the American Embassy in Japan have added to concerns of a falling-out between Japan and the United States, which has so far welcomed Mr. Abe’s efforts to strengthen Japan’s economy and military outreach in the region to serve as a counterbalance to China. The comments, which express revisionist views of Japan’s World War II history, have also led to renewed claims from Japan’s neighbors, particularly China and South Korea, that Mr. Abe is leading his nation to the right, trying to stir up patriotism and gloss over the country’s wartime history.

One of the most direct criticisms of the United States came this week, when Seiichi Eto, a governing party lawmaker and aide to Mr. Abe, posted a video online in which he criticized the Obama administration for expressing disappointment in the prime minister’s recent visit to a shrine. The visit to the shrine, which honors the war dead including war criminals, stoked anger in South Korea and China, which both suffered under Imperial Japanese rule.

“It is I who am disappointed in the United States,” said Mr. Eto in the video on YouTube, which was removed on Wednesday as the prime minister’s office sought to control the diplomatic damage. “Why doesn’t America treat Japan better?” he added.

The disconnect between Washington and its strongest Asian ally comes at a time of rising regional frictions that Mr. Abe has likened to Europe on the eve of World War I. The disputes over history and territory have complicated the United States’ already fraught attempts to persuade Japan and Korea to present a united front to a more confident China, while also trying to avoid antagonizing the Chinese.

American officials express frustration that Mr. Abe is not doing enough to allay fears in South Korea, a crucial American ally in Asia, about a conservative agenda they worry includes rolling back the apologies that Japan made for its early 20th-century empire-building. American officials also fear he could undermine his own efforts to restore Japan’s standing in Asia by playing into what they call Chinese efforts to paint the Japanese as unrepentant militarists.

Analysts say such concerns are behind the United States Embassy’s taking the unusual step of publicly criticizing Mr. Abe’s trip to the shrine.

For their part, Japanese officials express their own exasperation that the United States does not take a clearer stand in favor of Japan in its continuing dispute with China over the control of islands in the East China Sea. They also complain that the Obama administration has not rewarded Mr. Abe enough, despite his self-proclaimed efforts to improve ties with Washington by taking such politically difficult steps as pushing to restart a stalled base relocation in Okinawa.

“Prime Minister Abe feels frustrated,” said Yuichi Hosoya, an expert on United States-Japan relations at Keio University in Tokyo. “He feels he is not being thanked enough for expending his political capital to strengthen the alliance.”

One of the most provocative comments from Abe allies came this month, when an ultraconservative novelist, Naoki Hyakuta, who was appointed by the prime minister himself to the governing board of public broadcaster NHK, said in a speech that the Tokyo war tribunal after World War II was a means to cover up the “genocide” of American air raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States Embassy called the comments “preposterous.”


Mr. Hyakuta’s comments came days after the new president of NHK, who was chosen last month by a governing board including Abe appointees, raised eyebrows in Washington by saying that Japan should not be singled out for forcing women to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during the war, saying the United States military did the same. Most historians say the Japanese system of creating special brothels for the troops, then forcing tens of thousands of women from other countries to work there, was different from the practice by other countries’ troops in occupied areas who frequented local brothels.

The Japanese discontent with treatment by the Obama administration goes back to early last year, when a newly elected Mr. Abe tried to arrange an immediate trip to meet the president, only to be told to wait a month. More recently, Japanese officials have appeared hurt that Mr. Obama wants to spend only one night in Japan during a visit to the region in April.

Some analysts say this feeling of being held at arm’s length may be driving some of the recent criticisms of the United States.

“This is one of the most dangerous moments in U.S.-Japan relations that I have seen,” said Takashi Kawakami, an expert on international relations at Takushoku University in Tokyo. “Japan is feeling isolated, and some Japanese people are starting to think Japan must stand up for itself, including toward the United States.”

Analysts note that many of the comments are being made by relatively minor figures, and not members of Mr. Abe’s cabinet. They also say that Japanese public attitudes remain overwhelmingly favorable toward the United States, which has been the guarantor of Japan’s postwar security with its 50,000 military personnel stationed in the country.

At the same time, the analysts say, frustrations on both sides are real. In the United States, they reflect an ambivalence toward Mr. Abe, as some worry that he is returning to the agenda he pursued the last time he was prime minister — trying to revise the country’s pacifist Constitution and downplay wartime atrocities in the name of restoring lost national pride.

“I think the Yasukuni visit was a turning point in U.S. attitudes toward Abe,” Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, said of the visit to the shrine. “It was a reminder that he is still trying to push his patriotic remake of postwar Japan.”

The Yasukuni Shrine visit, and the American criticism of it, also appeared to unleash the current wave of revisionist statements.

American analysts and officials have faulted Mr. Abe for failing to sufficiently distance himself and his administration from the nationalistic statements. Instead, his government’s spokesman has merely said the statements represented the speakers’ “personal views” without criticizing them, though the spokesman did say the administration had asked Mr. Eto to remove the video expressing disappointment in the United States.

Visiting members of Congress have also warned that revisionist statements as well as Mr. Abe’s visit to Yasukuni would only benefit China. They added, however, that the American relationship with Japan is still sound enough to be easily fixable.

“There are always unfortunate statements and unfortunate comments even among the best of friends, and this is something that is going to have to be worked out and gotten over with,” said Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who was part of a group of visiting Congress members in Tokyo who met on Wednesday with Mr. Abe. “It is important that we have an economically vibrant and strong Japan to act as a counterbalance to China.”
=============================================

Doctors of Depravity

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die.

Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials.

Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during the four months before Japan's defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.

These barbaric acts were, he said this week, "educational", to improve his knowledge of anatomy. "We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education."

Why did he do it? "It was the order of the emperor, and the emperor was a god. I had no choice. If I had disobeyed I would have been killed." But the vivisections were also a revenge on the "enemy" - Filipino tribespeople whom the Japanese suspected of spying for the Americans.

Mr Makino's prisoners seem to have been luckier than some: he anaesthetised them before cutting them up. But the secret government department which organised such experiments in Japanese-occupied China took delight in experimenting on their subjects while they were
still alive.

A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese prisoner who was still alive.

Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.

"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.

The place where these atrocities occurred was an undercover medical experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was known officially as the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau - but all the Japanese who worked there knew it simply as Unit 731.

It had been set up as a biological warfare unit in 1936 by a physician and army officer, Shiro Ishii. A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University, Ishii had been attracted to germ warfare by the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning biological weapons. If they had to be banned under international law, reasoned Ishii, they must be extremely powerful.
Ishii prospered under the patronage of Japan's army minister. He invented a water filter which was used by the army, and allegedly demonstrated its effectiveness to Emperor Hirohito by urinating into it and offering the results to the emperor to drink. Hirohito declined, so Ishii drank it himself.

A swashbuckling womaniser who could afford to frequent Tokyo's upmarket geisha houses, Ishii remained assiduous in promoting the cause of germ warfare. His chance came when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, the region in eastern China closest to Japan, and turned it into a puppet state.

Given a large budget by Tokyo, Ishii razed eight villages to build a huge compound - more than 150 buildings over four square miles - at Pingfan near Harbin, a remote, desolate part of the Manchurian Peninsula.

Complete with an aerodrome, railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms, crematoria, cinema, bar and Shinto temple, it rivalled for size the Nazis' infamous death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The numbers of prisoners were lower. From 1936 to 1942 between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women and children were murdered in Unit 731. But the atrocities committed there were physically worse than in the Nazi death camps. Their suffering lasted much longer - and not one prisoner survived.

At Unit 731, Ishii made his mission crystal clear. "A doctor's God-given mission is to block and treat disease," he told his staff, "but the work on which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of those principles."

The strategy was to develop biological weapons which would assist the Japanese army's invasion of south-east China, towards Peking.

There were at least seven other units dotted across Japanese-occupied Asia, but they all came under Ishii's command. One studied plagues; another ran a bacteria factory; another conducted experiments in human food and water deprivation, and waterborne typhus.

Another factory back in Japan produced chemical weapons for the army. Typhoid, cholera and dysentery bacteria were farmed for battlefield use.

Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory.

Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.

Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.
But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.

Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.

Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.

"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."

Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.

Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.
Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite - a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by gratuitously cruel means.

On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.

Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.

People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.

Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flame-throwers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances. They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax.

All of these atrocities had been banned by the Geneva Convention, which Japan signed but did not ratify. By a bitter irony, the Japanese were the first nation to use radiation against a wartime enemy. Years before Hiroshima, Ishii had prisoners' livers exposed to X-rays.

His work at Pingfan was applauded. Emperor Hirohito may not have known about Unit 731, but his family did. Hirohito's younger brother toured the Unit, and noted in his memoirs that he saw films showing mass poison gas experiments on Chinese prisoners.

Japan's prime minister Hideki Tojo, who was executed for war crimes in 1948, personally presented an award to Ishii for his contribution in developing biological weapons. Vast quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.

Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.

Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an estimated 400,000 Chinese.

One victim, Huang Yuefeng, aged 28, had no idea that by pulling his dead friend's socks on his feet before burying him he would be contaminated.

All he knew was that the dead were all around him, covered in purple splotches and lying in their own vomit. Yuefeng was lucky: he was removed from a quarantine centre by a friendly doctor and nursed back to health.

But four relatives died. Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I cannot live with them under the same sky."

The plague bombing was suspended after the fifth bacterial bombing when the wind changed direction and 1,700 Japanese troops were killed.

Before Japan surrendered, Ishii and army leaders were planning to carry the war to the U.S. They proposed using "balloon bombs" loaded with biological weapons to carry cattle plague and anthrax on the jet stream to the west coast of America.

Another plan was to send a submarine to lie off San Diego and then use a light plane carried on board to launch a kamikaze mission against the city. The war ended before these suicidal attacks could be authorised.

As well as Chinese victims, Russians, Mongolians, Koreans and some prisoners of war from Europe and the U.S. also ended up in the hands of Ishii, though not all at Unit 731.

Major Robert Peaty, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the senior British officer at Mukden, a prisoner-of-war camp 350 miles from Pingfan. Asked, after the war, what it was like, Peaty replied: "I was reminded of Dante's Inferno - abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

In a secret diary, Peaty recorded the regular injections of infectious diseases, disguised as harmless vaccinations, which were given to them by doctors visiting from Unit 731. His entry for January 30, 1943, records: "Everyone received a 5cc typhoid-paratyphoid A inoculation."

On February 23, his entry read: "Funeral service for 142 dead. 186 have died in 5 days, all Americans." Further "inoculations" followed.

Why, then, after the war, were nearly all the scientists at Unit 731 freed? Why did Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi 'Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, have to flee to South America and spend the rest of his life in hiding, while Dr Shiro Ishii died at home of throat cancer aged 67 after a prosperous and untroubled life?

The answer is that the Japanese were allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the American government, which wanted Ishii's biological warfare findings for itself.
In the autumn of 1945, General MacArthur granted immunity to members of the Unit in exchange for research data on biological warfare.

After Japan's surrender, Ishii's team fled back across China to the safety of their homeland. Ishii ordered the slaughter of the remaining 150 "logs" in the compound and told every member of the group to "take the secret to the grave", threatening death to anybody who went public.

Vials of potassium cyanide were issued in case anyone was captured. The last of his troops blew up the compound.

From then on, a curtain of secrecy was lowered. Unit 731 was not part of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. One reference to "poisonous serums" being used on the Chinese was allowed to slip by for lack of evidence.

Lawyers for the International Prosecution Section gathered evidence which was sent directly to President Truman. No more was heard of it.

The Americans took the view that all this valuable research data could end up in the hands of the Soviets if they did not act fast. This was, after all, the kind of information that no other nation would have had the ruthlessness to collect.

Thus the Japanese were off the hook. Unlike Germany, which atoned for its war crimes, Japan has been able to deny the evidence of Unit 731. When, as now, it does admit its existence, it refuses Chinese demands for an apology and compensation on the grounds that there is no legal basis for them - since all compensation issues had been settled by a treaty with China in 1972.

Many of the staff at Unit 731 went on to prominent careers. The man who succeeded Ishii as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Green Cross, once Japan's largest pharmaceutical company.

Many ordinary Japanese citizens today would like to witness a gesture of atonement by their government. Meanwhile, if they want to know what happened, they can visit the museum that the Chinese government has erected in the only building at Pingfan which was not destroyed.

It does not have the specimens kept at Unit 731: the jars containing feet, heads and internal organs, all neatly labelled; or the six-foot-high glass jar in which the naked body of a Western man, cut vertically in two pieces, was pickled in formaldehyde.

But it does give an idea of what this Asian Auschwitz was like. In the words of its curator: "This is not just a Chinese concern; it is a concern of humanity."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-439776/Doctors-Depravity.html#ixzz2to2pmZDt

[G M]

Attention American allies: If you are shocked when Obama fcuks you over, you haven't been paying attention.

[Crafty_Dog]

 Japan Reinvents the Role of Its Military
Geopolitical Diary
Thursday, May 15, 2014 - 19:19 Text Size Print

Japan has claimed that it is preparing for war to preserve peace. After receiving the findings of a constitutional advisory panel on May 15, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave a televised address to the nation outlining his vision for expanding the Japan Self-Defense Forces' global reach. To do so, Abe's government will seek to reinterpret the constitution -- particularly Article Nine, which forbids Japan from maintaining armed forces or engaging in war -- to allow for "collective self-defense," or the use of force in defense of other nations.

Neither the panel's report nor Abe's speech are unexpected. They are simply another step in the careful political and legislative path that Abe is following to take advantage of a rare moment of parliamentary strength to make changes that he and other advocates of military normalization have long desired. Because of Japan's militaristic past, Abe's mission is highly controversial, both at home and abroad. Abe's Cabinet will have to decide how to proceed, and relevant legislation will have to be debated and approved by the Japanese Diet. While the entire process may not wrap up by the end of the year, it looks increasingly likely that Japan will move to allow collective self-defense to some degree in the near future.

On a fundamental level, Thursday's report shows that Japan is igniting a national debate about the nature of war and peace. The purpose of Japan's constitutional pacifism is to preserve peace, but what if preserving peace requires the threat or use of force? Should Article Nine be interpreted literally, as an absolute renunciation of the use of force and maintenance of arms, or should it be interpreted more loosely as an imperfect articulation of Japan's desire to preserve peace? Abe's legal advisers argue that constitutional interpretations have evolved over the past several decades, and that now is the time for further evolution. They have come down decisively in favor of the belief that the constitution's pacifist principle is an end rather than a means -- in other words, an exclusively nonviolent stance cannot adequately discourage war, but developing greater war-fighting capabilities can. From this perspective, emerging threats abroad will force Japan to develop new ways of countering those threats to preserve its end goal: peace.


Details of the new constitutional interpretation still need to be hashed out and will likely go through several iterations before the Diet will approve the new laws. The advisory panel argues that Japan can and should exercise its right to collective self-defense when under direct attack or when direct harm is done to the U.S.-Japan alliance, the international order or the rights of the Japanese people. These conditions seem as if they could be interpreted to justify action in almost any scenario, but a range of restrictions would still be in place to constrain Japanese military action. For example, Tokyo may need to receive a request for aid from a fellow nation and gain Diet approval before taking action.

It is still too early to say what the new rules will be and what will concretely change. One can argue that the question of formal constitutional interpretation is moot because of the way power works in reality. Would Japan really have refrained from using force if the United States was attacked? Would other countries really refrain from attacking the United States because Japan has pledged it would rise to the defense? In most wartime scenarios, Japan's national interests would likely have compelled emergency legislation or de facto action to respond to any scenarios that threatened the United States or Japan's immediate security. Ultimately, a new legally sanctioned interpretation of the constitution remains merely an interpretive matter. It can try to influence, but it cannot guarantee, any particular course of action in the real world.

On the other hand, adopting collective self-defense would be significant in several ways. First, legal changes could help shift domestic perceptions of the Japanese military's purpose and legitimacy. The Japanese have long held closely to the country's pseudo-pacifist doctrine, making it likely that any leader flouting the restrictions would face debilitating political backlash. But China's economic rise, military modernization and emerging naval power, as well as North Korea's missile program and nuclear tests, have helped to change the Japanese public's perception of external threats over the past two decades. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami have also helped frame the Japanese military as a force for good. Now, by carefully amending the laws surrounding the military's actions, Japanese leaders are encouraging the public to think of the military as an institution that can be trusted with wider responsibilities and powers while remaining under close political control. The debate will only intensify with the proposed legal changes, but the grounds of debate may shift toward those who favor a stronger military.

The legalization of collective self-defense also opens the door to a faster evolution of the Japanese military's role. Depending on what form the laws take, Japan could make formal alliances or other security arrangements with smaller powers that would benefit from its deterrent capability. The most likely path would be for Tokyo to try to fill gaps between the U.S.-Japan alliance and the United States' bilateral alliances with other nations friendly to Japan, particularly U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan could also seek to form stronger ties with European states, especially France and the United Kingdom, with whom Japan has a long history of alliances and naval interaction. Tokyo could also look to form closer security relations with powers outside the U.S. system. Vietnam -- whose long-standing troubles with China are on the rise -- would be a contender, though such an alliance would likely only take shape under more extreme circumstances, given its hostility toward China.

Thus in the short term, Japan's legal changes will mostly consist of altering the terms of the domestic debate, but they will later open up new options for decision-makers to respond to a wider range of eventualities. In particular, Japan's Self-Defense Forces could gain more freedom to intercept missiles aimed or launched at allies; search or apprehend vessels at sea that lend support to allies' enemies; help allies with military logistics such as refueling; engage in self-defense operations while on international peacekeeping missions; rescue foreign nationals; and respond to actions by small unidentified groups or "infringements" that fall short of an attack. Because of Tokyo's inherent institutional and technological advantages, these changes will spur serious reassessments of Japan by its neighbors and allies. China will view Japan's evolving posture as the newest and most consequential attempt at containment, made all the more threatening because Japan could become less susceptible to U.S. control. Japan has made no secret that China's growing military capabilities and desire to change the status quo are providing the most compelling reasons for its military normalization.

Meanwhile, the United States will welcome a Japan that is finally taking on a greater international security burden, but it will also recognize the risk that Japan's increasing influence over regional security decisions could pose to U.S. interests. As Japan takes on more responsibility in maintaining regional security, it will extend its own chains of security relationships, which could antagonize China and raise the risk of entangling the United States in conflicts that Washington would rather avoid.

Read more: Japan Reinvents the Role of Its Military | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook

[DougMacG]

Bringing some of this over from Michael Yon thread:

CD: "Any discussion of Japan must include the subject of demographics.  That the birth rate falls FAR short of the replacement rate has profound implications.  The median age of the Japanese population is rising rapidly.  Among other things this means that the ratio of workers to retirees is falling.  Is this sustainable?  Or does the implied push to ever higher tax rates stifle the Japanese economy as its export driven model is increasingly challenged by anti-globalist winds?"

GM: "Japan is on the path to becoming the first all robot nation."
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Crafty, that's right.  
http://oecdinsights.org/2016/04/11/the-case-of-the-shrinking-country-japans-demographic-and-policy-challenges-in-5-charts/


GM perhaps got the answer before I could ask the question.   )

Japan went from an expanding retiree to worker ratio to where the population is actually shrinking too.  Could they grow their way out?  Sure, but why would they with tax rates increasing.

Immigration is essentially zero.  This is good and bad...  And not easily changeable.

They are already in fiscal stimulus mode, pumping up with infrastructure spending and (short term?) deficits without getting out of the multi-decade slump.

They have run QE past the point of zero interest rates, to negative interest rates, to government buying assets.  A necessary attempt perhaps but not healthy, not good and not working.

They already faced two rounds of consumption tax rate increases - while in stimulus mode ??

Now they need to provide for their own defense, and maybe even pay for it.  With what?  They need additional, growth killing, tax rate increases while in stimulus mode??!!

They were cutting their corporate tax rate from highest in the world.  Now we are highest in the world.  If we passed the current US proposal, would Japan again be highest?  If so, hard to compete.  Better to manufacture in lower wage, lower tax countries.

The (consumption) tax rate increases already in place and coming most certainly rule out economic growth.  Is the goal now just survival?

Yet they are still the second third richest country in the world(?)

They are on the leading edge of having to figure out what a lot of other places have to figure out.

Yes, robots robotic functions are part of the answer.  But that leaves jobs like nurses and personal care attendants, needs that don't go away leading the measure of labor income rates.  Unionization and artificial hikes are the only gains to be made there, a zero sum game.  The additional wage that one person makes, another person (or government) pays.

Consumer spending is never going to lead them out of the funk as consumption tax rates escalate.  The export economy of the great Japanese companies like Honda, Toyota, Sony either shifted manufacturing to lower wage countries, destination countries like US, and/or robotics.  Canon, where I once worked, is dominating its main product category yet declining in sales and profits: https://amigobulls.com/stocks/CAJ/income-statement/annual

There was a period in Hong Kong where they lowered tax rates, took in more revenues as a result, lowered tax rates further, took in even more revenue, etc and had phenomenal growth.  This spiral is in the opposite direction with no macro-economic or demographic solution in sight.

[Crafty_Dog]

By Alastair Gale
Dec. 8, 2017 7:48 a.m. ET
0 COMMENTS

Japan plans to make its first purchase of missiles that could target North Korean military bases from long distance, a major military upgrade as a rising nuclear threat from Pyongyang sparks a regional arms race.

The decision, announced Friday, includes the potential purchase of missiles from Lockheed Martin Corp. and is likely to be welcomed by President Donald Trump. During a visit to Tokyo in November, Mr. Trump called for Japan to buy “massive” amounts of military equipment from the U.S.

Under Mr. Trump, the U.S. has sought to push Japan to upgrade its military capabilities and shoulder more of the burden of its defense. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is largely in agreement as he seeks to loosen restrictions on the Japanese military.

However, the introduction of new offensive military hardware may meet political opposition from those in Japan who object to any change to the nation’s official pacifism. Following its defeat in World War II, Japan renounced war and has primarily relied on the U.S. military umbrella for its defense since then.

Japan’s Defense Ministry said it would request around $19 million in next fiscal year’s budget to buy the Norwegian-built Joint Strike Missile for Japan’s F-35 jet fighters. The JSM cruise missile has a maximum range of around 300 miles.

The ministry will also seek funding to research how to modify its F-15 jet fighters to carry cruise missiles developed by Lockheed Martin Corp., including the extended-range Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile. The JASSM-ER has a maximum range of around 620 miles, meaning Japan would be able to reach North Korean land targets with missiles fired from aircraft flying close to Japan.

The ability to target North Korea from long distance would help avoid danger from Pyongyang’s antiaircraft missile systems. In May, Mr. Kim oversaw a test of a new surface-to-air missile system estimated by security scholars to have a range of around 90 miles.

In a press conference, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera played down the use of the missiles against North Korea, saying Japan would continue to rely on the U.S. to target Pyongyang’s bases in a conflict. But before becoming defense minister for a second time earlier this year, Mr. Onodera was a leading advocate of Japan acquiring the ability to respond to any North Korean offensive with an attack on the source.

“The missiles are a piece of the puzzle of developing the ability to strike enemy bases,” said Kunio Orita, a retired general in Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force. But Mr. Orita said Japan still lacks real-time surveillance ability to monitor bases of nearby countries.

The plan by Japan to buy cruise missiles is the latest step in an arms buildup in Northeast Asia as North Korea has accelerated its missile and nuclear development in the last few years. North Korea has tested three intercontinental ballistic missiles this year, as well as other missiles that could hit Japan and South Korea.

Last year, South Korea deployed a U.S.-built missile defense system and is currently working on a new ballistic missile capable of destroying North Korea’s underground military facilities. Japan also intends to purchase a new land-based missile defense system from the U.S.

Mr. Onodera highlighted how the planned purchase of cruise missiles would help Japan respond to hostile amphibious forces before they could reach any of Japan’s islands. Japanese officials have long been concerned that China may challenge Japan’s sovereignty on its southern island chain by force.

The two countries are currently in a dispute over sovereignty of a collection of uninhabited islets in the same region.

In a response to a faxed request for comment about the Japanese announcement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said: “We urge the Japanese to act prudently in military and security matters, so as to play a positive and constructive role in maintaining regional peace and stability.”

North Korea’s state media had no immediate statement on the Japanese announcement and its foreign ministry couldn’t be reached for comment.

[DougMacG]

This also means Japan will acquire missiles capable of hitting Beijing.  And capable of hitting eastern Russia.
For the umpteenth time, Mr Xi Jinping, why is this necessity in the best interest of the Chinese politburo?

When South Korea and Taiwan deploys missiles and missile defense, go nuclear, will they then get it?

The NK issue and Trump's dealing with it, telling allies they need to share in the burden of their own defense, has been turned on its ear - against China.

This threat was made possible over these decades by China.  China enjoyed a good laugh over the American agony of the situation.  Now it has spun out of their control, assuming they are still unwilling to resolve it -
 forcefully in Pyongyang.

[Crafty_Dog]

By Phillip Orchard


Japan’s North Korea Strategy: A Solid Defense


Peripheral to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Japan is slowly building up military capabilities.


Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe isn’t having the best Olympics. Over the weekend, at a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in ahead of the opening ceremonies, Abe’s goal was to secure a commitment that Seoul would resume joint military drills with the U.S. after the Paralympics end in March and to sustain sanctions pressure on Pyongyang, while refraining from spiking a 2015 accord intended to resolve lingering animosity over Japanese abuses in World War II. According to South Korean media, Moon told Abe not to meddle in the South’s “sovereignty and internal affairs,” and essentially sent Abe to his room to think about Japan’s past bad behavior.
Abe also had to watch as the nascent detente between the two Koreas picked up pace, culminating with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inviting Moon to an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang. During his meeting with the North Korean delegation headed by Kim’s sister, Moon reportedly declined to press Pyongyang to denuclearize, heightening concerns among the U.S., Japan and hawks in South Korea that Moon’s government may be laying the groundwork to weaken sanctions pressure on the North and potentially extend the temporary freeze in U.S.-South Korea joint exercises. Adding apparent insult to injury was yet another show of support from the Chinese for South Korea’s pursuit of reconciliation with the North, stoking concern that Beijing is succeeding in using the Korean crisis to drive a wedge between Seoul and its stalwart allies.

All of this highlights an uncomfortable reality for Japan: It is perhaps the country most vulnerable to a nuclear North Korea – including even South Korea – but also, of all the key players involved in the standoff, the one with the least ability to independently shape the outcome of the crisis. It’s a peripheral player and likely will be until the crisis is settled one way or another. But it’s also on a path to ensure that it doesn’t find itself confined to the sidelines in this sort of situation again.

Seoul Keeps Its Enemies Closer

The weakness of Japan’s hand is reflected in the peculiar dynamic that has emerged between South Korea and the two rivals on its flanks.

Seoul’s apparent embrace of Beijing while giving the cold shoulder to Tokyo may seem mystifying. After all, it was China that implemented informal economic sanctions on South Korea last year over Seoul’s decision to go forward with the U.S. deployment of the THAAD ballistic missile defense system – a strategically dubious (and ultimately futile) attempt to coerce Seoul into prioritizing Chinese security over its own in the middle of a crisis.  During a high-profile visit to Beijing last fall, when the two sides made a show of unity by jointly declaring that war could not be allowed on the peninsula, Beijing signaled that it would continue to inflict economic pain on the South whenever it strayed from Chinese wishes – despite Seoul agreeing to refrain from additional THAAD deployments. And it’s China that is helping keep the North Korean regime afloat more than any country, except possibly Russia, by blocking U.S.-led attempts to strengthen U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang, particularly with regard to oil imports.

Yet South Korea has reportedly remained reluctant to implement parts of a landmark intelligence-sharing pact with Japan brokered by the U.S. in 2016. Some of this has to do with Seoul’s lingering resentment over Japan’s prewar occupation of Korea and unease about Japan’s growing determination to shed its postwar pacifist constraints. Some of it has to do with the perception that Japan is acting merely as a U.S. proxy to pave the way for a U.S. military operation on the peninsula over Seoul’s objections – a move that would put the South Korean capital region at risk of massive North Korean shelling. But mostly it has to do with the fact that China simply matters more than Japan in the current crisis.

That said, Chinese influence in Pyongyang has waned considerably since Kim Jong Un came to power. Though China has thrown its rhetorical support behind Moon’s detente with Pyongyang, it’s unclear what Beijing could really do to push talks toward a resolution that both it and Seoul would find acceptable. China’s overriding goals are to expel the U.S. from the peninsula and to ensure that a friendly, or at least not overtly hostile, government rules the North. These, along with the long-term threat China poses to South Korea, limit how far Seoul can align itself with Beijing in the current crisis – especially if Seoul succeeds in persuading the U.S. to refrain from a unilateral operation to disarm the North.

Nonetheless, Beijing still has as much leverage over North Korea as anyone. Even if it cannot bring Pyongyang fully to heel without harming its own core interests on the peninsula, it at least has some latent ability to alter Pyongyang’s cost calculations and, if enough stars align, potentially help the North Koreans save enough face to be willing to stand down. At minimum, China doesn’t want to see a war on the peninsula that puts U.S. forces on the Yalu River and a pro-U.S. government in Pyongyang, which means Beijing certainly isn’t going to try to thwart Seoul’s efforts to forestall a conflict through dialogue. This makes Seoul’s alignment with Beijing at this stage low risk. As was made clear when Vice President Mike Pence said that the U.S. was open to talks with the North without preconditions, at this point, “maximum pressure” and dialogue need not be seen as automatically conflicting.

Japan, in comparison, just doesn’t have the ability to either substantially further or frustrate Seoul’s objectives. Of all the relevant players, it has the least leverage over Pyongyang. It cannot yet act on its own militarily to eliminate the threat, as its slow remilitarization is still in its very early stages. Even new landmark procurements that would give it at least limited ability to strike the North, such as long-range cruise missiles, are expected to take years to complete. The best it can do for the foreseeable future is align itself with the U.S.

Thus, to South Korea, Japan may either lend a helping hand or become a threat, but at the moment there’s little downside to pushing Tokyo on politically explosive but strategically unimportant issues such as wartime “comfort women” and tiny islands in the Sea of Japan. In fact, it’s convenient to do so at a time when Moon is facing heavy criticism from South Korean conservatives and widespread public skepticism about his hearty welcome of the North Koreans at the Olympics.

Japan’s Long Game

To be clear, Japan can be a pivotal player in support of how the U.S. and South Korea decide to proceed. The Americans would lean heavily on Japanese help to facilitate and contain the fallout of a U.S. military operation. Short of war, Japan could play a valuable role in implementing a blockade on the North. It’s already using its diplomatic and economic influence across Asia and beyond to quash North Korea’s efforts to circumvent sanctions. If and when everyone simply decides to live with a nuclear North, Japan’s superb intelligence, submarine warfare, anti-ballistic missile systems and anti-mining capabilities would be invaluable in deterring Northern aggression.

But no country with Japan’s combination of untapped power and inherent vulnerabilities would be content with the role of good team player executing someone else’s strategy indefinitely. Tokyo is certainly not sitting on its hands. Japan may not have many options today, but it’s moving to ensure that it doesn’t find itself in this sort of situation in the future.

This is why Japan has been spearheading efforts to lay the groundwork for a tightened defense framework anchored by Australia and India, while also gradually ramping up security and economic assistance to strategically important ASEAN states locked in territorial disputes with China. Alongside this effort, Japan has also been the driving force behind the revival of the strategic Trans-Pacific Partnership, that, despite appearing dead following the U.S. withdrawal early last year, appears set to be finalized by the remaining 11 members later this year. Finally, at home, Japan is moving methodically to shed legal and political constraints on remilitarization, while slowly building up military capabilities that will give it greater ability to step out from under the U.S. security umbrella and secure its vital interests farther afield.

None of these efforts appears ready to come to fruition quickly, whether due to conflicting interests among the regional states Japan is trying to shepherd toward tighter cooperation, or due to powerful and unpredictable political currents at home. Nevertheless, the disquieting realities exposed by the Korean impasse – the limits of U.S. power in the Indo-Pacific, uncertainties about whether South Korea will remain a part of the U.S.-led alliance structure, and Chinese disinterest in working to preserve the established order – have certainly helped them gain traction. In this way, being confined to the sidelines in today’s crisis may ultimately help Japan get where deeper geopolitical forces are urging it to go.

[Crafty_Dog]

Not wild about the title, but the news about REES is big.

Japanese Imperialism With Chinese Characteristics
Apr 18, 2018

By Jacob L. Shapiro

It is exceedingly rare for a scientific study about deep-sea mud in the Pacific to have geopolitical import. But then, we live in crazy times.

Nature – one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals – published a paper on April 10 analyzing a deep-sea mud patch near Minamitorishima Island, a small island in the Pacific off the coast of Japan, and concluded that the 965-square-mile (2,500-square-kilometer) mud bed contained such a high concentration of certain rare-earth elements that it could meet the world’s REE demand for almost a millennium. This is uncharted territory for Japan, a country driven to horrible extremes in the first half of the 20th century by its dearth of natural resources and still defined by its reliance on imports to this day.


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A discovery of rare-earth elements cannot eliminate Japan’s extreme reliance on imports. This is a country that imported almost 90 percent of its energy needs and 60 percent of its caloric intake last year, and REEs cannot power automobiles or be served for dinner. And even though the Japanese scientists who conducted the study believe the mud can be mined in the “near future,” academics tend to have a different sense of what the near future means than the rest of the world. REEs are not actually all that rare – they are just costly and environmentally destructive to mine. It will take Japan years to take advantage of this breakthrough.

Even so, the discovery is a major boon for Japan. REEs have become increasingly important for the production of everything from flat-screen TVs to advanced military weapons systems, and until now, Japan has depended on a risky source for its supply: China. China accounted for 80 percent of global REE production last year and has not hesitated in the past to use this as leverage over Japan, mostly recently in a 2010 dispute over a Chinese trawler that collided with a Japanese coast guard patrol ship in disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands. For Japan, this discovery kills two birds with one stone: It offers Japan a chance to curtail its reliance on foreign imports for a key natural resource while also potentially weakening China’s grip over the REE market worldwide.

Strength Through Self-Sufficiency

It is an ironic shift in roles between East Asia’s two major powers. One of the defining differences between China and Japan has always been China’s abundance of natural resources. This imbalance played a critical part in Japan’s invasion of China in 1931 and Japan’s development of a formidable maritime force in the 19th century because securing sea lanes and access to natural resources was (and remains) synonymous with Japan’s survival. China has an ideological bent toward self-sufficiency because historically it has been capable of self-sufficiency. That, however, is beginning to change, and as it does, the relationship between Japan and China will transform as well.

China has risen to global prominence on the back of its export-driven economy. But imports are becoming more important than ever for the Middle Kingdom. Mao Zedong wanted China to be strong, and for him, that meant self-sufficiency. This fixation on self-sufficiency did not change even after Deng Xiaoping opened China’s economy up to the world. In 1996, China’s State Council issued a directive to achieve 95 percent self-sufficiency in grain production, and this goal was affirmed in China’s Mid- to Long-Term Grain Security Plan released in 2008. But in late 2013, Beijing conceded that Chinese appetites had grown too large, and “moderate imports” became an official part of China’s national food strategy. Now China is the world’s largest importer of soy and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will become the top importer of corn by 2020.

Oil is another key area where China’s reliance on foreign suppliers is becoming more pronounced. Last year, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest crude oil importer, a reflection both of increased U.S. domestic production and increased Chinese demand. In 2004, China imported just over 2 million barrels per day; last year, that figure rose to 8.4 million bpd. About 56 percent of Chinese oil imports came from OPEC countries in 2017 and 14 percent came from Russia, which means China has to consider both how to secure its maritime trade lanes to the Middle East and how to avoid becoming the Europe of the East, unable to challenge Russian ambitions because of its dependence on Russian energy. This will also make China particularly vulnerable to any power capable of blocking its access to these imports – the ultimate trump card in any U.S.-China trade negotiation.

Increasing Competition

These are problems with which Japan is intimately familiar. Japan, however, has a much smaller population than China and a more equitable distribution of wealth. China, and the myriad imperial dynasties that preceded it, has always had its hands full just with maintaining order at home. Building the type of maritime capability needed to secure far-flung resources is incredibly costly, and China is being forced to pour money and resources not into making sure hundreds of millions of Chinese living on less than $5.50 a day reach long-promised prosperity but into building and training a navy capable of protecting Chinese interests abroad, as well as building infrastructure in some of the most insecure regions of the world.

The more China becomes dependent on imports, the more Chinese geopolitics should begin to mirror Japanese geopolitics. And that necessarily means that China and Japan, which until now have established a pragmatic if uneasy working relationship, will increasingly compete over the same resources and trade routes. The REE issue is a perfect example. It is no coincidence that a week after the article in Nature was published, Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Chinese ships were carrying out illegal REE surveys in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. Japan’s new REE treasure trove is located near a coral atoll roughly 1,150 miles from the main Japanese island chain – an advantage for the Japanese considering that they can exploit resources there with little environmental impact for the country’s main islands. But it’s also a disadvantage because it makes the resources vulnerable to Chinese exploration.

Chinese-Japanese competition over resources won’t erupt overnight, or even in the next year. For every Chinese violation of Japanese waters or Japanese development of new military capabilities, there is another diplomatic meeting meant to show that the countries are still friends – consider the ministerial-level meeting held between China and Japan in Tokyo this week, after an eight-year hiatus in economic talks. Direct conflict is not in the interest of either side yet and may not be for years to come. But make no mistake: As China grows more dependent on imports, its behavior will come to resemble Japan’s. The REE discovery is exceptional news for Japan, good news for the world, and bad news for China. But the more important story here is the slow development of what we might call “Japanese imperialism with Chinese characteristics.”

[Crafty_Dog]

By George Friedman


The Trap in Japan’s National Strategy


Japan’s post-war reliance on the U.S. may be obsolete if Korea talks succeed.


Since World War II, the foundation of Japanese national strategy has been reliance on the United States to protect Japan’s national interests. The U.S. ensures that sea lanes supplying Japan with essential raw materials stay open. It guarantees Japan’s physical security – against threats from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and from China thereafter. And it gives Japan access to American markets, first during its financial recovery from the war and then as part of its development into the world’s third-largest economy. In return, the Japanese accepted the presence of American forces in Japan, providing a base of operations designed to preserve the control of the Northwest Pacific that the U.S. attained during WWII. From those bases, the U.S. could block the Soviet fleet in Vladivostok, support operations in South Korea and so forth.

Those were the direct benefits, but indirectly Japan received an additional perk: absolution from participating in U.S. conflicts. The U.S. had crafted a post-war constitution for Japan that prohibited it from developing a military. Much as with Germany, the sense was that the permanent disarmament of Japan was essential to prevent the re-emergence of a militaristic country. And as with Germany, the U.S. came to regret this principle. As the American strategy of containment took shape against the Soviet Union, the U.S. wanted a rearmed Germany to block Soviet moves in the west. Similarly, as the Korean War broke out, the U.S. wanted Japanese military force to assist it. Japan helped with essential military production – trucks, for example – but it held on to Article 9, the provision in its constitution that prevented it from forging a military to fight in Korea.

Later, Japan reinterpreted Article 9 from an absolute prohibition on military force to an absolute prohibition on an offensive military force. Then, as its military force developed, Japan redefined the meaning of an offensive force to focus not on the nature of the force but on the nature of its utilization. A destroyer or fighter plane is by its nature an offensive weapon, but Japan decided that so long as such weapons were not used offensively, their existence was constitutional. Using this logic, Japan has developed a substantial military force that it withholds from any offensive operation, although it has used it in some peacekeeping operations.

Japan has therefore avoided operational deployment in U.S. wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, it has developed a significant naval and air force, and it is capable of becoming a nuclear power at will, given that it has one of the most sophisticated civilian nuclear programs in the world. One joke goes that Japan does not have a nuclear weapon because a single screw needed to enable it has not been tightened. That may overstate the hurdles but it captures the principle. The limit of Japanese military power is Japan’s will.

On the whole, the U.S. has been content with this arrangement, even if it is occasionally frustrated by Japan’s posture as an ally. The strategy worked great for Japan for more than 70 years, until the balance on the Korean Peninsula showed signs of changing. At first, as the nuclear threat in North Korea grew, the United States became more alert and aggressive toward the threat. The South Koreans supported an aggressive American policy, and the pro forma call for the Chinese to reason with North Korea did not yield a solution. The U.S. threatened military action to destroy the North Korean weapons, and though Japanese bases might be used, Japan would not be involved militarily.

But Japanese strategy began to go off the rails recently with an attempt at rapprochement between North and South Korea. In its pre-World War II strategy, Japan had long viewed the Korean Peninsula as a buffer between itself and the mainland. The Japanese occupied the peninsula to ensure that this buffer remained. After the war, the division of the peninsula and the American presence in the south guaranteed the buffer. But then last year’s Olympic rapprochement happened, and it altered a significant strategic assumption of the Japanese: that the status quo was a given. There suddenly existed the potential for an accommodation between North and South and even potentially, over time, increased Chinese influence there. Even as a distant and unlikely possibility, this was a serious problem for Japan. If the U.S. would accept an understanding between the North and South, and if that understanding included the withdrawal of some or even all U.S. troops from Korea, then the strategic balance would shift.

Japan would lose its buffer against China. The Sea of Japan, not the Yellow Sea, would become the naval focus, and with U.S. interest in the region declining, it would be the Japanese navy that would have the primary mission of controlling the Sea of Japan. North Korea could give up its intercontinental missiles, which threaten the U.S., but keep its shorter-range missiles capable of reaching Japan, and thus Japan would have to openly create its own nuclear deterrent. And depending on the extent of the U.S. retreat from the region, Japan may no longer be able to rely on the U.S. to guarantee its access to raw materials.


 

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And Japan’s concerns are not utterly far-fetched. South Korea has an overriding imperative to avoid another war on the peninsula. The U.S. does not want intercontinental ballistic missiles in North Korea, but it might accept a deal permitting short-range missiles. And though neither North nor South Korea really trusts the Chinese, a U.S. retreat from the region might require some accommodation with China.

Obviously, this scenario has yet to play out, but the Japanese have made it clear to anyone who will listen that the direction of accommodation is unacceptable to them. And this is where Japan runs into the trap embedded in its national strategy. Depending on its relationship with the U.S. to both protect it from major threats and excuse it from significant offensive action, the Japanese force, though far from insignificant, does not give Japan the weight to change the course of the negotiation. China has the potential to do so. The U.S. does as well. Japan does not.

Charles de Gaulle warned the world of this type of problem. The ultimate guarantee during the Cold War was that, if needed, the U.S. would escalate to nuclear war to block Soviet advance. De Gaulle argued, however, that the U.S. would not trade New York for Paris. Now Japan must ask itself how far the United States would go to maintain its position in the Northwest Pacific. The region is important to the U.S., but likely not important enough to warrant a nuclear exchange. The U.S. can exit and survive. Japan does not have the luxury.

For the first time since World War II, Japan must consider whether the strategic reality in its region could evolve in a direction “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,” to quote Hirohito’s surrender speech in 1945. Such a shift would require Japan to rethink how it sees itself and its role in the world. Nothing may change. Indeed, with less than three weeks to go until the scheduled Kim Jong Un-Donald Trump summit on June 12, the U.S. is already suggesting there’s a “substantial chance” talks won’t happen in June. But if reconciliation happens, Japan may not have time to create the military force it will need to defend its interests. Japan cannot wait until there is clarity, nor can it proceed without a political crisis. Japan is trapped between a new reality and its old strategy.

[Crafty_Dog]

Japan quietly builds its military. Japan is scheduled to adopt new national defense guidelines at a Cabinet meeting in December, during which the government is expected to order 100 more U.S. F-35 aircraft, on top of the 42 it already ordered. These are supposed to help counter the latest J-20 stealth jets that China unveiled earlier this year. There are also rumors that Tokyo plans to acquire a multipurpose “mothership” that would serve a similar function to an aircraft carrier. Despite constitutional restrictions on building an offensive military, the Japanese government has found ways to increase the capabilities of its self-defense force while still accommodating the law. Between China’s military development and Washington’s delegating security responsibilities to its neighbors, Japan has a need to become more self-sufficient in matters of defense.

[Crafty_Dog]

By Phillip Orchard


Will Abe’s Article 9 Revisions Fly?


Japan’s Constitution is distinctly anti-war – but naval developments suggest a changing tide.


Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s march to reform the war-renouncing Japanese Constitution is still mired in a slog of domestic political resistance. But, as has generally been the case since the Japan Self-Defense Forces were reconstituted in 1954, Tokyo isn’t waiting for public concern to align neatly with its strategic interests. Rather, it is pushing forward with plans to arm itself with equipment and systems that can address Japan’s core geopolitical vulnerabilities – and further its ability to flex its muscles far from its shores.

Next week, Abe’s Cabinet is expected to approve a pair of documents laying out defense priorities for the next decade. Drafts of the plans leaked this week, and highlights illustrate just how far Tokyo is stretching the limits of what has been acceptable under its pacifist constitution, which has banned purely offensive weapons such as aircraft carriers, long-range bombers and ballistic missiles. The new guidelines are expected to formally abandon Japan’s de facto cap on military spending at 1 percent of gross domestic product. (Japan is currently set to spend around $240 billion over the next five years.) The new spending will reportedly focus on missiles, including missile defense systems to guard against threats from China and North Korea and new, longer-range cruise and hypersonic missiles of its own.

But the star of the show is a plan to turn at least one of the Japanese navy’s two largest flat-decked helicopter destroyers into a fixed-wing aircraft carrier – its first since World War II – the ultimate tool for projecting naval power. Tokyo is reportedly set to order at least 20 F-35B fighter jets, the variant of the multirole jet capable of vertical or short takeoffs and vertical landings without a catapult launcher, in the next year. Is the Japanese navy once again ready to sail upon – and take flight from – the high seas?

A Carrier, by Any Other Name

Japan’s long-term ambition to edge back into naval aviation has been clear since at least 2012, when work began on the first of its two Izumo-class flat-decked warships.

The JS Izumo and the JS Kaga, by far the largest ships in the Japanese navy’s fleet, are officially referred to as “helicopter destroyers.” Neither has the armaments, speed or maneuverability of typical destroyers used as nimble escort ships. What they do have is an 814-foot (248-meter) flat deck – dramatically longer than their Hyuga-class predecessors, which were themselves launched only in 2009 and can carry out most of the mission requirements of the Izumo class.

The Izumo-class flat decks are considerably smaller than those sported by U.S. supercarriers (the newest of which clocks in at 1,106 feet). They’re slightly shorter than the U.S. Navy’s America-class amphibious assault ships but still longer than Italian and Spanish carriers, all of which are designed to carry F-35B fighter jets. According to a Ministry of Defense study released in April, the Izumo-class ships would need only modest retrofits, such as the installation of a ski jump, to be able to carry the F-35B. Unnamed Japanese navy sources told the newspaper Asahi Shimbun in February that the Izumo ships were originally designed with conversion into fixed-wing carriers in mind.


 
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Tokyo is still twisting itself into knots to avoid describing the carriers as offensive attack instruments. If adapted for fixed-wing aircraft, they will reportedly be reclassified as “multipurpose operation destroyers.” (This summer, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party toyed with the term “defensive aircraft carrier,” but even that was too provocative.) Yet the rationale for fixed-wing carriers is expected to be that Japan needs to ensure that at least some of its fighter planes would survive a first strike by China or North Korea – still a defensive purpose.

So why the semantic contortions? Abe’s push to revise Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution with language that allows for a more flexible interpretation is still very much in doubt. The latest target date for passage by Japan’s parliament is mid-2019, but the timeline keeps getting extended, most recently on Monday. Though pro-amendment parties have a two-thirds majority in both houses of the National Diet, they have competing priorities, and any amendment would need to be approved in a national referendum. There’s a geopolitical element as well: Tokyo is keen to avoid arousing further suspicions among its neighbors, particularly in Seoul and Beijing, about the trajectory of its remilitarization.

The carrier issue illustrates why Article 9 matters – and why it doesn’t. Legal and political constraints have certainly limited the military’s ability to prepare for future conflicts. In a crisis the Japanese public would probably support whatever measures Tokyo deemed necessary to secure the country. Japan’s ability to act in a military crisis, however, would hinge on peacetime decisions made years in advance over issues such as spending, training and doctrine. And Japanese governments have long pursued controversial capabilities at a glacial pace, lest they face crippling legal or political blowback. Even so, Article 9 hasn’t kept Abe’s government from toeing the legal line and building breakout capability to enable the Japanese military to modernize in a hurry once it has cleared the legal and political hurdles.

Preparing for an Uncertain Future

Tokyo can still claim that the Izumo-class warships are primarily suited for defensive purposes. At present, they carry only helicopters that would be used primarily for anti-submarine warfare. With space for some 400 marines and 50 light vehicles, the warships could also be used for amphibious assault operations – a capability typically considered offensive, since amphibious operations are usually conducted in enemy lands. Given how many of Japan’s far-flung islands in the East China Sea are lightly protected and vulnerable to Chinese capture, though, Japan can reasonably claim that it has a defensive need for amphibious assault. Indeed, Abe’s government has faced little resistance to its plans to develop amphibious capabilities, including the activation in April of Japan’s first marine unit since World War II.

For the foreseeable future, the ability to execute these sorts of missions is probably enough to meet Japan’s most immediate strategic risks. So long as it remains tightly allied with the U.S. – and Washington remains willing to go to bat for Tokyo – Japan would need to play only a support role in U.S.-led operations in nearby waters. (Article 9 also limits Japan’s ability to participate in joint operations with allies outside Japanese territory.) Tokyo, in fact, has often taken advantage of its constitutional constraints to offload some of its security burden onto the U.S. and to keep its spending focused on the economy. But Japan can’t be sure that the U.S. will stick around forever or – given China’s knack for preventing U.S. forces from operating freely in its coastal terrain – that Washington would be willing to face the costs of joining a Sino-Japanese war. Japan has a geopolitical imperative to keep sea lanes open. It is almost entirely bereft of natural resources, and without the free transit of oil and other commodity imports, its economy would grind to a halt. It needs at least to be moving toward developing a strike capability in distant seas.

The evolution will be slow, even without legal hurdles. As China has demonstrated, having shiny new aircraft carriers is hardly the same thing as being able to send a carrier strike group off to battle in distant waters. A carrier group needs things like advanced support ships and air wings, tightly integrated combat systems, and an extensive network of supply depots and maintenance hubs. Most important, it needs generations of training and operational experience with naval aviation. China is scrambling to build institutional operational memory from the ground up.

Although the Japanese navy has carrier experience, few people in Japan today were alive the last time it conducted a carrier operation, and the game has changed since World War II. Tokyo is getting started now on what it might need in 30 years. (Think of the new “multipurpose operation destroyers” as carriers with training wheels – ones that happen to have elite anti-submarine warfare and amphibious capabilities.) Japan’s distinct advantage is that it can continue working closely with the U.S. to get up to speed relatively quickly – while accessing cutting-edge U.S. technology, to boot. China, absent any allies with meaningful naval experience, will be stuck figuring it all out on the fly.

[Crafty_Dog]

Oct. 22, 2019
For Japan, the Sword Is the Shield
Is Tokyo’s remilitarization nearing an inflection point?
By Phillip Orchard


World War II determined that the United States, not Japan, would be the dominant military force in the Western Pacific. After all, you can’t be a dominant military force without a military – and the U.S. saw to it that Japan wouldn’t when it made Tokyo constitutionally renounce all martial enterprises. But things changed, as they so often do. Washington quickly concluded that the demands of the Cold War were such that it couldn’t afford to give Japan a free ride on U.S. defense guarantees. So the United States – the same United States that drove Tokyo to embrace pacifism in the first place – pushed Japan to rebuild a robust but solely defensive-oriented force. Their alliance became known as “the spear and the shield.” Japan was the shield, invaluable as it was in containing Soviet naval adventures in Northeast Asia, and the U.S. was the spear, projecting power for offensive purposes whenever the situation demanded.

More recently, slowly but surely, Tokyo has built up new military capabilities and has begun removing the political and legal obstacles that prevent it from using them. Now the U.S. wants Japan to do even more – and fast. On Sunday, an unnamed senior Pentagon official in Tokyo issued a rare call for Japan to kick its remilitarization efforts into overdrive, saying Japan’s aversion to offensive weaponry was “no longer acceptable,” and that other restrictions are “affecting the ability of both U.S. forces and Japan’s own Self-Defense Forces to prepare for contingencies.”

This came two days after Tokyo confirmed that it was planning to deploy warships to the Middle East to protect vital shipments of oil and natural gas. Such plans have been in the works since a Japanese-operated oil tanker was attacked in June in the Gulf of Oman, an incident that was followed by a suggestion from U.S. President Donald Trump that the U.S. military was losing interest in protecting other countries’ commercial traffic. Notably, though, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga made it clear that Japan would not formally join the U.S.-led maritime coalition to protect commercial vessels around the Arabian Peninsula – and that Japanese warships would not patrol the contentious Strait of Hormuz, the critical chokepoint where an outbreak of conflict with Iran would be most likely.

The question these two developments pose is: Is Japanese remilitarization nearing an inflection point?



 

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Washington’s concern over a fully remilitarized Japan made enough sense in the past. Historically, in fact, a primary U.S. goal in forming alliances has been to contain the power of its partners, rather than to benefit from their assistance. And since the end of the Cold War, preventing the rise of regional hegemons has been a core tenet of U.S. strategy across the globe. A resurgent Japan capable of militarily acting independently of the U.S. would risk upsetting stability in the Western Pacific by accelerating the arms race among the region’s myriad rival powers, while undermining the U.S. unquestioned dominance of the seas and its cherished alliance structure. (See: the Japan-South Korea feud that just won’t die.)

Over the past decade, though, it’s become clear that the biggest threat to the regional balance of power is not Japanese remilitarization but Chinese militarization – to say nothing of China’s “salami slicing” tactics along critical sea lanes in the East and South China seas – as well as North Korea’s plunge into nuclear statehood and the fact that the U.S. is simply too overstretched to continue to be the world’s policeman. In this environment, the U.S. needs Japan to do more to keep the region in balance – even if its remilitarization will inevitably unnerve other U.S. allies like South Korea, while making it easier for historical adversaries like North Korea, China and Russia to justify their own assertiveness.

Tokyo is keen to step up. Given its overwhelming dependence on resource imports and manufacturing exports, it has little choice but to build the capabilities to protect sea lanes farther afield, including those in the Middle East. Japan has therefore been trying to persuade Washington for nearly a decade that U.S. interests would be well served by a more assertive Japanese military posture – and that major changes in both the international system and Japanese society guarantee that its remilitarization won’t lead to some sort of a revival of Japanese imperialism. The U.S. has been tacitly supportive of this shift; you don’t sell a country a bunch of F-35Bs (the variant of the warplane capable of taking off from flat-decked warships like Japan’s new Izumo-class destroyers, which will soon be converted into small aircraft carriers) if you don’t want it to project power beyond its territorial waters. The latest, more explicit call from the Pentagon for Tokyo to embrace offensive warfare merely suggests that the two sides are now working together to make it happen.


 

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With the U.S. increasingly on board, the remaining constraints on Japanese remilitarization are internal political, legal and budgetary factors. This is illustrated by the Abe government’s quixotic quest to amend or reinterpret the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. It’s also illustrated by Japan’s cautious approach to keeping vital sea lanes open in the Middle East.

Article 9 hasn’t kept Tokyo from building out its military capabilities or from blurring the legal lines on their use. Japanese anti-mining capabilities are considered elite, for example, making it an ideal partner in the effort to keep maritime traffic flowing around the Arabian Peninsula. In 2014, moreover, the government approved a reinterpretation of Article 9 to permit the military to exercise the right of collective self-defense – essentially allowing Japanese forces to come to the aid of allies under attack during operations deemed necessary for Japanese security. Two security laws implemented in 2016 formalized the reinterpretation and expanded the scope of the type of operations that the Japanese military can support. Since then, Abe’s government has been gradually lifting informal caps on military spending, activating the first Japanese marine unit since World War II, while pursuing weapons systems – such as the aforementioned carriers and long-range cruise missiles capable of striking ballistic missile launch sites in North Korea – that underscore the idea that the best defense is a good offense.

Still, the legal and political constraints embodied by Article 9 have certainly limited the military’s ability to contribute to maritime stability beyond Japanese waters or prepare for a future crisis on its doorstep. In a real crisis, the Japanese public would probably support whatever measures Tokyo deemed necessary to secure the country. But Japan can’t wait until a crisis erupts to shift course. Its ability to respond will depend on peacetime decisions made years in advance over issues such as spending, training and doctrine. And preventing a crisis from erupting in the first place means taking part in multinational stabilization coalitions like the one developing in the Middle East. Japan is willing to join, but the unsettled legal and political constraints on the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force have left it with tightly restrictive terms of engagement, forcing it to steer well clear of the areas where risks of conflict are highest (and where its contributions would be most valuable).

No country likes to be told what to do, and Abe’s government can ill-afford to be seen as flouting or changing Japanese law at the bidding of an outside power. But fact of the matter is that there remains strong opposition to remilitarization. Tokyo’s timeline for revising Article 9 keeps getting pushed back, despite Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s holding a supermajority in both branches of the Japanese legislature. Abe may therefore welcome the public push from the Pentagon to gun up, just as he likely welcomed Trump’s call this summer for Japan to take responsibility for securing oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. The more the Japanese public grows concerned about threats from China and North Korea, and the more it feels uncertain about U.S. willingness to protect it from those threats, the more likely it will be to back Abe’s revision push.

Whether or not Abe succeeds in revising the charter this year, Japan’s long-term trajectory is clear. The country has little choice but to take greater responsibility for its far-flung interests. And Japan has the technological and industrial base and national cohesion to pivot more quickly than most countries if and when the public consents to it. But given how long it will take, and how expensive it will be, for Japan to fulfill its inevitable geopolitical role, and given the scale and speed with which threats to Japanese interests are mounting, politically-driven decisions can have a disproportionately large impact. Hence the sense of urgency in Tokyo and Washington to press forward.


 

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/30/africa/japan-to-invest-billions-in-africa-intl/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2rctakydnwZDDAvV-k6dqoDoeOCPT5XrQ7nkjYGWqWYVPOBCe1Fscjb28

[Crafty_Dog]

apan Modernizes Its Air Force, but Will It Be Enough?
5 MINS READ
Nov 20, 2019 | 10:00 GMT
An Oct. 14, 2018, photo shows an F-35A fighter aircraft of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force taking part in a military review at Asaka training ground in Asaka, Saitama prefecture, Japan.
An Oct. 14, 2018, photo shows an F-35A fighter aircraft of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force taking part in a military review at Asaka training ground in Asaka, Saitama prefecture, Japan.

(KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS

Japan is accelerating the buildup of its offensive capabilities as part of its military normalization process, with its air force at the forefront of the effort.

The newly acquired JASDF offensive capabilities will greatly enhance Japan's flexibility and independence in its defense.

A multiplicity of threats and a struggling domestic defense industry will continue to pose challenges for Japan.

Japan is accelerating its military normalization process by building up its offensive capabilities, especially those of its Japanese Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF). As a part of that push, the United States on Oct. 29 granted Japan's request for a major upgrade to its F-15J fighter aircraft. Installing advanced radar and cruise missile capability on 98 JASDF jets will mark a crucial step in Japan's move away from its post-World War II pacifist stance. And while the upgrades will enhance Tokyo's options, maintaining Japanese national defense as the country's aerospace industry declines and the regional threat environment — including an expanding Chinese military — becomes more complex will become increasingly difficult.

The Big Picture

Tokyo, long focused on maintaining a purely defensive military, is now building its offensive capabilities to better deal with emerging threats. How Japan deals with its security challenges in its increasingly complex neighborhood will have significant regional and global implications.

From Defense to Offense

Since its founding in 1954, the JASDF has focused on developing potent air defense and anti-ship capabilities. This largely meshed with Japan's postwar self-image as a pacifist country with an air force geared exclusively toward defending the home islands. While the JASDF built a considerable ability to intercept inbound enemy jets and warships, it couldn't mount offensive operations beyond the immediate waters around Japan. Instead, Tokyo relied on its security alliance with the United States to serve as its offensive capability: If need be, the Japanese military could be the shield, and the U.S. military could be the sword.

Though Japan's pacifist strategic posture outlived the Cold War, it has steadily eroded in the 21st century as Washington urged it to beef up its military and because of Tokyo's concern that the U.S. commitment to Japanese national defense could waver. Japan's increasing alarm at a nuclear North Korea and a rising China have only reinforced the trend, spurring Japan to accelerate efforts to normalize its military.

One of the first significant steps for the JASDF in this regard was acquiring aerial refueling aircraft in 2008. Japan had previously never developed this capability given its potential to extend the range of its combat aircraft such that they could reliably strike other countries. Japan sought to justify the purchase by arguing it allowed the JASDF to reduce fuel costs, extend the duration of its air defense patrols and enhance its response time.

Another significant step in Japan's military's normalization occurred with the 2016 announcement that it was developing a new anti-ship cruise missile with the built-in capability of striking land targets. Such weapons, including versions that can be launched from the air, significantly enhance the JASDF's ability to strike at Tokyo's potential adversaries — including North Korea and China — on their own territory.

This photo shows a Lockheed Martin AGM-158 joint air-to-surface standoff cruise missile (JASSM).

A Lockheed Martin AGM-158 joint air-to-surface standoff missile (JASSM) in front of an aircraft at an air show on July 16, 2018, in Farnborough, England. The AGM-158 JASSM is a low observable standoff air-launched cruise missile and is likely to be used with Japan's F-15J fighters.

(Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images Images)
The JASDF's decision to majorly upgrade its F-15J fighter jets furthers Japan's transition to offensive military capabilities. The modernization of the aging, but still powerful, fighters will see them equipped with potent cruise missiles.

An F-15J/DJ fighter aircraft at the Japan Air Self-Defense Force's Hyakuri air base in Omitama, Ibaraki prefecture, Japan, on Oct. 26, 2014.


In conjunction with the new F-35 jets Tokyo has purchased, the upgrade will enhance Tokyo's ability to go on the offensive, including the ability to preemptively strike its adversaries, rather than just to defend itself — and the ability to inflict pain, of course, carries a deterrent effect. But even as Japan is bolstering its military, the already-substantial threats it faces are also growing.

An Expanding Array of Threats

During the Cold War and in close alignment with the United States, Japan focused on the Soviet Union as the only significant threat to the home islands. Today, Japan's threat environment is significantly more complicated. In addition to intercepting the Russian aircraft that still regularly approach Japan, the JASDF must contend with the much more active Chinese air forces — the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and the People's Liberation Army Naval Air Force (PLANAF). Moreover, North Korea has emerged as a major missile and nuclear threat over the last decade, forcing Japan to devote considerable resources to developing missile defenses and driving the JASDF toward obtaining offensive capabilities.

The PLAAF's and PLANAF's qualitative leaps in equipment seriously concern the JASDF. While the Chinese air forces have always outnumbered the JASDF, the latter typically boasted significantly better jets and pilots. But this is no longer a given since China has begun fielding large numbers of advanced jets and has greatly bolstered pilot training. Japan's approximately 300 fighter jets backed up by approximately 20 early warning and control aircraft, are well outnumbered by the Chinese air forces' 1,000 modern fighter jets and about 30 early warning and control aircraft.

Japan has sought to build its capabilities against these threats as quickly as possible by purchasing 147 of the already-in-production F-35s and by upgrading its F-15Js. But these decisions, especially the F-35 purchase, have caused some controversy in Japan.

A Japan Air Self-Defense Force F2 jet fighter at the Higashi-Fuji firing range in Gotemba, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, on August 24, 2017.
A Japan Air Self-Defense Force F2 jet fighter at the Higashi-Fuji firing range in Gotemba, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, on Aug. 24, 2017. The aircraft is manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Lockheed Martin for the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, with a 60-40 split in manufacturing between Japan and the United States.

(TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP via Getty Images)

Heavy reliance on purchases from the United States has disappointed the Japanese defense aerospace industry, which has largely been stuck with a marginal assembly role. Japan's purchases of foreign-built aircraft have left many domestic parts suppliers under increasing stress. In a 2016 ministerial survey, 52 of 72 aerospace companies said they are aware of supply disruptions and parts makers going out of business. Maintaining a mature domestic aerospace industry capable of meeting Japanese security needs against future challenges will be harder for Japan, given that its sector has been starved of major contracts as Tokyo has largely looked to the United States for big purchases.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://mercatornet.com/the-incredible-shrinking-land-of-the-rising-sun/62509/

[DougMacG]

https://mercatornet.com/the-incredible-shrinking-land-of-the-rising-sun/62509/

Median age is almost 50, fast approaching the retirement age.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/

Russia also has no population growth.  Europe and US too, if not for immigration.

[Crafty_Dog]

A More Assertive China Drives Japan to Respond in Kind
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
7 MINS READ

HIGHLIGHTS

Japan has long operated beyond the pacifist constraints of its post-war constitution, but a growing and more assertive China is accelerating Tokyo's development of offensive its capabilities. Japan's core strategic imperatives are shaped by economic concerns -- the islands are resource-poor and thus import-dependent. This shaped its post-World War II Yoshida Doctrine, in which Japan largely outsourced its national security to the United States while focusing its energy on economic development at home. With Japan less confident in its dependence on the United States, the same vulnerability is now driving Tokyo to take on a more active role in its neighborhood. Japan's increased economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific provides a regional alternative to China for Southeast Asian nations, but may raise tensions with neighboring South Korea. ...

Japan has long operated beyond the pacifist constraints of its post-war constitution, but a growing and more assertive China is accelerating Tokyo's development of offensive its capabilities. Japan's core strategic imperatives are shaped by economic concerns — the islands are resource-poor and thus import-dependent. This shaped its post-World War II Yoshida Doctrine, in which Japan largely outsourced its national security to the United States while focusing its energy on economic development at home. With Japan less confident in its dependence on the United States, the same vulnerability is now driving Tokyo to take on a more active role in its neighborhood. Japan's increased economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific provides a regional alternative to China for Southeast Asian nations, but may raise tensions with neighboring South Korea.

Moving Beyond the Yoshida Doctrine

Just as Chinese President Xi Jinping has moved China past Deng Xiaoping's doctrine, which called for China to avoid showing its strength while it rebuilt internal power, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has sought to move beyond the strategy Japan adopted under its postwar prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida. Though several factors have shaped Japan's defense evolution, today Tokyo is driven by the changes in Chinese international behavior and the growth of Chinese power. China's economy has far surpassed Japan's, leaving the island nation a distant third behind the United States and China in national GDP. China is rapidly increasing its technological capabilities, challenging Japan in traditional areas of strength, from semiconductors to high-speed rail. China has increased its investment and trade footprint throughout the region via its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), supplanting earlier Japanese soft power gains.

China's navy development over the past decade has outstripped Japan's, and the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) now operates freely in the East and South China Seas, as well as into the West Pacific. Chinese construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, along with the Philippines' rebalance away from the United States toward China, raises the risk of interrupting vital Japanese maritime supply lines. Chinese port development and investment stretching through Southeast and South Asia and into East Africa also create additional areas where China could interfere with Japanese supply lines.

Japan's Economic and Diplomatic Response

Japan uses its identity as both a democracy and the second-largest regional economy to strengthen its position as a viable alternative for regional leadership. Despite its wartime history, Japan is largely seen as a non-threatening partner throughout much of Asia, except of course by neighboring China and the Koreas.


In response to China's growing global presence, Prime Minister Abe traveled to Kenya to launch his "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" initiative in 2016, which emphasizes building economic, social and security connections from East Africa through Asia to Japan. Abe's declaration had followed China's 2015 launch of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and while Tokyo toyed with also joining China's initiative, it ultimately decided to offer an alternative source of development loans and aid. Japan also took a leading role in revising the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the United States pulled out in 2017, strengthening its regional trade arrangements through the re-named Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Tokyo has stepped up diplomacy, aid and cooperation across Southeast Asia, among the Pacific Islands and into the Indian Ocean Basin, with the intent of countering Chinese advances and strengthening Japan's economic and security position. In 2017, Japan helped revive the defunct Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (also known as the "Quad") comprising Japan, Australia, India and the United States. Japan is supplying the Philippines and Vietnam with new coast guard ships, and has eased its self-imposed restrictions on arms exports. Tokyo is actively incentivizing Japanese companies to reduce their supply chain dependencies on China and move operations to Southeast Asia, with Vietnam currently standing out as a preferred spot.

Redefining Self-Defense

Japanese governments have frequently reinterpreted Article 9 of the country's post-war constitution, which renounces war and nominally requires Japan to possess only a defensive military capacity to avoid a repeat the imperial actions that led to World War II. Abe has sought to formally change Article 9 by rewriting the constitution, but his attempts have continuously been sidelined by more immediate priorities or a lack of consensus. But despite his failure to amend Article 9, a more liberal interpretation of "self-defense" has allowed Japan to still make substantial strides in reorienting its military toward emerging geopolitical threats.

Over the years, Japan has revised what it considers "offensive" versus "defensive" weapons systems. Japan has added in-air refueling capabilities, approved the acquisition of long-range cruise missiles, and is now discussing the development of anti-satellite systems to protect its space-based assets. Following Japan's June announcement that it was canceling its plans for purchasing and deploying the U.S.-made Aegis Ashore missile defense system, elements of Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have revived discussions around Japan acquiring the capability to strike at foreign missile sites — something once taboo under the constitution.

Japan has already begun the process of updating its Izumo-class helicopter destroyers to take on F-35 joint strike fighters. In June, the United States approved the sale of 105 such aircraft to Japan, including 42 short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variants, which would bring Japan's total to 147 — the second-largest F-35 fleet in the world. Japan is also building an airbase on Mage Island off Kagoshima Prefecture for field carrier landing practice for the U.S. Navy and Japanese pilots.

In addition to its aircraft carrier development, Japan carried out its largest scale amphibious training drill since World War II in November 2019, honing its ability to retake island territory in case of war. Japan has also stepped up space cooperation with the United States, and is slated to lead a major multi-national cyber defense exercise later this year. Japan has an overseas base in Djibouti and has eased restrictions on the use of arms abroad by the country's Self-Defense Forces. Japan is expanding its basing through the Ryukyu Islands (bringing it closer to Taiwan), and is increasing regional port visits along and joint training exercises with the United States, Australia, India and other regional partners.

Regional Implications

Japan is positioning itself as a regional alternative to China for economic, political and security relations. While its pockets are not as deep as China's, Tokyo leverages assertions of better quality in both development and financing. Japan offers an alternative to China's BRI financing, both alone and in conjunction with partners including Australia and the United States. Japanese financing may require more careful considerations and planning by recipients than Chinese financing, but it also comes with fewer political strings, less fear of becoming a "debt trap" and with a higher level of trust in the technical acumen and quality of infrastructure.

A growing and more assertive China is now accelerating Tokyo's development of its offensive capabilities beyond the pacifist constraints of its post-World War II constitution.

Tokyo is also emerging as an alternative supplier of defense equipment, though primarily focused on maritime defense. Japan's involvement gives countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam greater confidence in standing up to Chinese challenges for their maritime territory, particularly as Japan's own reliance on the South China Sea represents a clear shared interest in ensuring open transit. Japan continues to enhance its regional security relationships, both in concert with its U.S. defense ties and independently, but has also maintained dialogue and cooperation with China and Russia, even as it sees China as the primary regional security threat. This balancing act enables Japan to simultaneously be a critical component of U.S. regional security and avoid a Cold War-type rift with China.

Japan's re-emergence as a regional military power, even without formally changing its constitution, is largely seen in a positive light as a local counterbalance to China (though China and the Koreas, of course, see this differently). The slow revision of the role of Japan's Self-Defense Forces over the last several decades, as well as Japan's lack of territorial disputes (aside from those with China and the Koreas), has engendered little overt concern of any new Japanese imperialism from Southeast Asia, and none from South Asia and East Africa. Tokyo's tensions with South Korea, however, remains a major complication, both for Japan's regional position and for the trilateral relationship between Japan, the United States and South Korea.

[Crafty_Dog]

October 12, 2020   View On Website
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    Japan’s Glacial Ascendance
Almost-great power status is Japan’s sweet spot – so long as the U.S. sticks around.
By: Phillip Orchard

For such a historic transition of power, the handover from Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving and most powerful postwar prime minister, to Yoshihide Suga was always going to be short on drama. Suga, Abe’s longtime chief of staff, faced only token competition from a handful of other ruling party bigwigs. His ruling Liberal Democratic Party commands large majorities in both houses of the Diet and doesn’t need to call for elections right away, diminishing any need to win over the public with platforms calling for sweeping change. And there's no real reason to think Suga, a proudly uncharismatic septuagenarian technocrat without an independent power base, is especially interested in or capable of steering the country in a new direction. After all, he was instrumental in both crafting and implementing his boss’ agenda for tackling Japan’s biggest problems: its decadeslong economic stagnation, demographic decline and the rapid rise of China. This agenda remains unfinished – and bedeviled by constraints that, under Suga, will grow steeper as Japan reels from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

In other words, continuity is once again the theme of the day in Japan – a fitting fate since the country is basically locked into its geopolitical trajectory. It’s perpetually toeing the line between great ally and great power. This makes Japan nothing if not steady, a buttress to a regional order thrown in flux by China’s rise and lingering uncertainty about the U.S.’ strategic direction. But it also means Japan is not really on track to break out as East Asia’s foremost economic or military power anytime soon. So for Tokyo, which perpetually craves greater strategic autonomy from the U.S. but fears being abandoned by it, continuity will mean doing everything possible to avoid the latter.

More Latitude

The pace of Japan’s revival as a major power tends to be gauged through the prism of its revival as a military power –
and this tends to be gauged through the prism of its endless debate over its war-renouncing constitution. Article 9 of the charter – which the U.S. wrote in 1947 but which much of Japanese society has embraced – explicitly forbids the use of force by Japan as a means to settle international disputes and strictly disallows Japan from having a military. But Japan has a very robust military, of course, even if an intentionally limited one, making the practical effect of the constitution on Japan’s defense posture often poorly understood.

The article itself isn’t an immovable legal constraint on Japanese remilitarization. Tokyo has routinely “reinterpreted” the clause to meet its defense requirements, beginning in 1954 when the military was reestablished as a “self-defense force” and an extension of the national police. By the 1990s, Japan had the world’s third-largest military budget. More recently, in 2015, Abe’s administration pushed another “reinterpretation” through parliament to allow Japanese forces to come to the aid of an ally in foreign conflicts. Under Abe, Japan’s weapons purchases increasingly blurred the lines between offense and defense, most notably its new fleet of “helicopter destroyers,” which are actually flat-decked amphibious assault ships capable of functioning as aircraft carriers. The latest debate over reinterpreting the charter concerns missile threats from China and North Korea, with Abe and Suga this summer abruptly canceling plans for the U.S.’ Aegis Ashore anti-missile system on grounds that the money should be spent instead on its own missiles capable of striking enemy launch sites.

By the logic of military deterrence, just about any weapons system can be deemed “defensive” if you try hard enough. (Japan doesn’t even see nuclear weapons as covered by Article 9.) For Tokyo, national defense cannot start at the edge of the country’s territorial waters. Since the country is almost entirely bereft of natural resources, it must maintain access to sea lanes through the South China Sea and Western Pacific – even ones as far away as the Persian Gulf, where Japan's deployment of minesweepers in 1991 marked a watershed moment in Tokyo’s return to military activities far from home.

And yet, the fact that Abe was determined to amend Article 9 to give Tokyo more latitude over the shape and use of military force – along with the fact that, despite the LDP’s supermajorities, Abe left office without doing so – illustrates that the pacifist constitution still matters, as do the political and strategic constraints it represents.

The Same Constraints

Throughout the Cold War, the goals of Japan’s remilitarization were twofold: One was to deter communist aggression, particularly by the Soviets. This meant a heavy emphasis on land-based forces that Japan no longer really needs and on elite maritime surveillance capabilities that have remained invaluable in service of its second goal: making itself an indispensable part of the U.S. alliance structure in the Western Pacific. The country has often been characterized as the “shield” to the U.S. “sword,” with Japan’s sophisticated submarine, minesweeping and air forces helping to keep the U.S. from becoming overstretched and to sustain its dominance of the strategically crucial first island chain.

In many ways, almost-great power status is Japan’s sweet spot – at least so long as the U.S. remains close. Its steady but incremental expansion of military capabilities has kept the U.S. invested, while still allowing Tokyo to focus mostly on economic development. It allows Japan to enjoy the domestic peace and prosperity of being a great power without having to take on many of the responsibilities and politically contentious costs incurred by great powers. It enables Tokyo to navigate domestic political resistance to military expansion and arms it with the credibility to argue that political constraints preclude it from being able to get its hands dirty in U.S. military conflicts in far-off places like the Middle East. For much of the region, Japan has enough economic, diplomatic and military influence to be a welcome counterweight to China’s rise but not so much that it distorts the regional balance of power or revives historical fears of Japanese imperialism (except in forever-grudgeful South Korea, of course.) Paradoxically, it gives countries like China incentives toward restraint, since provoking Japan too much could make Tokyo abandon the pretense of pacifism. Perhaps most important, it's allowed Japan to put quite a few of the pieces in place for a breakout – for example, in industry and technology and in training and doctrine – if required.

Indeed, Japan has quietly sought to lay the groundwork for a dramatic increase in capabilities if it felt war with China and/or abandonment by the U.S. were imminent. Hence the emphasis on weapons systems that blur the lines between offense and defense and on warships that could be transformed into aircraft carriers with a quick retrofit. Hence the steady increases in defense spending. (Suga in late September announced yet another record budget.) Hence Japan’s urgency to revive “the Quad” and multilateral economic initiatives in the region aimed at diminishing the risks of the U.S. losing interest in the region or getting tied down elsewhere.

But for Japan to truly break out and be able to stand on its own militarily, continuity isn’t enough. Matching China’s breakneck expansion, or even replacing the bulk of what the U.S. brings to the alliance, would require a staggering increase in defense spending and reorientation of Japanese industry. It would probably have to go nuclear. Given its shrinking population, it would have to require a large percentage of its citizens to forget about all that Article 9 stuff and serve in the armed forces. And, given how long it takes to build modern ships, develop overseas bases and logistics networks and so on, it wouldn’t be able to wait until a crisis to get started.

This is why the constitution is still a constraint. Japan would need the bulk of the country – voters, the bureaucracy, industry – to be behind the effort. The assumption has always been that if Japan were truly threatened by, say, China or North Korea, the nation would swiftly come around to support an end to Japan's self-imposed pacifism. North Korea has been test-launching missiles over the home islands, and China’s ever-expanding naval and air forces have been making incursions into Japanese waters and airspace. But the latent public unease represented by the Article 9 debate makes it fairly clear that no such support for nationwide mobilization is forthcoming – particularly during a recession. And though the charter can be carefully and occasionally sidestepped, it still has tremendous influence on the incentives of Japanese politicians and on the country’s powerful bureaucracy. If every major reinterpretation requires years of careful staging, bureaucratic wrangling and political and legal risk, the pace of Japan’s military revival will remain incremental.

This is why, for all of Abe’s efforts to get Japan to stop apologizing and start prepping for the day it needs to take full responsibility of its security, his main focus was on more tightly aligning Japan with the U.S. It wasn’t as routine as it sounds.
The U.S.-Japan alliance has more often than not been an uneasy marriage of convenience, with the two sides routinely at odds over a range of issues, particularly China. Abe’s predecessors from the Democratic Party of Japan even tried to take advantage of a small window opportunity for a Sino-Japanese rapprochement. But that window quickly closed because, among other reasons, Chinese ultra-nationalists began seeing the country for the first time in centuries as the stronger of the two, with the long-term trends in its favor. Abe saw Beijing as thus having no interest in a grand bargain that wasn’t dictated on its terms. Abe also saw his own country as being unable to reverse the power differential enough to change Beijing’s thinking. Neither of these dynamics will be any different under Suga. Now as then, preserving the status quo means doubling down on the Americans and hoping continuity will be enough.   

[Crafty_Dog]

Biden and Suga expressed concerns over Taiwan and human rights in China.
By: Geopolitical Futures

Tough talk. The summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga produced a lot of tough talk directed at Beijing and some conspicuous rhetoric regarding Taiwan, as well as some interesting hints at Japan’s growing willingness to take on a much more robust role in regional military matters. But as is often the case with these things, there were few concrete commitments. They did, however, agree on joint investment of some $4.5 billion in next-generation communications, i.e., “6G.” The focus appears to be on developing what’s known as Open RAN, an open-source platform that ostensibly would reduce the ability of a small number of telecom giants, like China’s Huawei, to dominate the industry.

[Crafty_Dog]

Japan's combat hesitancy. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Thursday that Japanese troops would not get involved if China invaded Taiwan. Suga was clarifying the intent of a joint statement released last week following his meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden that mentioned, for the first time since Sino-Japanese relations were normalized in 1972, Taiwan by name. It’s a curious thing to say, since even the possibility of Japanese intervention is a deterrent to Beijing – and since a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would pose a huge strategic problem for Tokyo. But it speaks to the enduring power of domestic opposition to Japanese involvement in foreign wars.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/988468/japan-has-no-anti-espionage-laws

[Crafty_Dog]

Japanese military drills. Japan's military is conducting nationwide drills for the first time since the end of the Cold War. The exercises, which will last through the end of November, involve around 100,000 troops, 20,000 vehicles and hundreds of aircraft. The goal appears to be to improve capabilities to flow forces to Japan's southwesternmost islands – those where some sort of conflict with China would be most likely to break out. Japan has been restructuring its forces to better defend such islands for the past couple of years.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1139394/japan-should-secretly-and-immediately-create-hydrogen-bombs

[G M]

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1139394/japan-should-secretly-and-immediately-create-hydrogen-bombs

Yes. So should Taiwan.

[Crafty_Dog]

November 22, 2021
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Japan’s Indispensable Role in Southeast Asia
Japan is operating from an advantage, so long as the broader alliance structure holds.
By: Phillip Orchard

One of the funnier moments of the past few years in geopolitics took place in 2017 in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bedroom. Duterte had been in power for only about six months at this point, but he'd famously announced a divorce from the United States, Manila's longtime treaty ally, and aggressively courted China. Given the Philippines' outsize strategic importance in the region, it was easy to see Duterte as hellbent on upending the balance of power in the Western Pacific. And yet, here he was, in the most intimate of diplomatic settings, eagerly showing the leader of China's foremost historical rival – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – the virtues of bed nets.

The Davao City visit underscored an oft-overlooked factor in the burgeoning competition for influence in Southeast Asia: This isn't just a two-power game. And in a region leery of both China's rise and getting hung out to dry by the U.S., Japan is seen as perhaps the best-equipped country to preserve the status quo. A slew of recent moves by Tokyo, including last week's announcement of a new "2+2" security dialogue with Manila, illustrates just how much Japan has been quietly but assiduously stepping into the role.

Japan Can’t Stop

Japan is a natural fit as a counterweight to China’s expansion in Southeast Asia for several reasons. The most important is that Japan's strategic focus on the region can't and won't wane. (Not so for the U.S.) It can't get bogged down by matters elsewhere in the globe, and it can't simply conclude that the costs and risks of competing for influence against China aren't worth it – in other words, that things would turn out just fine if it decided to cede supremacy over the South and East China seas to Beijing. Japan has a robust, energy intensive domestic economy and manufacturing base but scant natural resources of its own. Therefore, it is almost wholly dependent on imported commodities, and the bulk of these pass through contested regional waters. It’s all-too-familiar with the risk of allowing one or more foreign powers to be in position to cut off these maritime flows. It can't let it happen again.

As a result, Japan has to play a savvy, proactive game to prevent Southeast Asian states, particularly the all-important archipelagic countries that flank the region's most vital waterways and maritime chokepoints, from getting pulled firmly into China's orbit. If they become too economically dependent on China, and if they believe that China's rise as the dominant military power in the Indo-Pacific is inevitable, they might well conclude that their best option for long-term peace and prosperity is to enter into a tributary relationship with China. In this scenario, China overcomes its major geographic disadvantage – having numerous rivals in position to close down maritime chokepoints and thus threaten the flow of its own vital commodity imports. Japan would be forced to try to match China's power and reach directly. Given China's mass and Japan's demographic and budgetary constraints, the odds would be stacked against Tokyo.

So Southeast Asian states have full faith that Japan's engagement won't be intermittent or half-hearted. They also know that Japan's engagement will be comprehensive, aimed at meeting the region's economic, political and security needs in ways that the U.S. has often struggled with. This view is born from experience as much as strategic logic. Japan has been the foremost foreign investor, infrastructure builder and employer in Southeast Asia for decades. Japanese companies were the original pioneers of offshoring in the 1980s and 1990s, setting down deep roots throughout the region and building out the vast networks of accompanying infrastructure needed to unlock the breakneck modernization of many Southeast Asian economies.

This has made it so that despite the surge of outbound Chinese investment in recent years and ambitious projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, Japan is still the top investor in most Southeast Asian states. Contrary to widely held assumptions, it's not even particularly close. In 2019, inbound foreign direct investment from Japan to Association of Southeast Asian Nations states was nearly three times as high as China. (Europe and the U.S. also consistently rank higher than China.) Japanese infrastructure investment in 2019 in the six most strategically important countries in Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines – outpaced China’s by more than $100 billion.

And there's little reason to think Japanese economic involvement in the region won't continue to grow. It was Japan that revived the moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership after the U.S. left the pact for dead in 2017, giving Southeast Asian members Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore (and possibly eventually Thailand) reason to believe the rules-based trading system wasn't on the verge of collapse. Negotiations on the massive, Southeast Asia-centric Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership also likely wouldn’t have survived without Japan's involvement. Partly in response to Beijing's advantage of being able to rely on state-owned enterprises to tailor foreign investments around strategic objectives, Japan has become much more active in trying to pair public official development assistance with private investment when deemed strategically important. In 2015, for example, it launched its Partnership for Quality Infrastructure program backed with more than $100 billion. Last year, it launched a program to subsidize Japanese companies leaving China for Southeast Asia.

Japan’s Advantage

For most Southeast Asian countries, foreign policy is dominated by trade and investment policy. But given how Chinese encroachment in waters like the South China Sea is directly impacting the economic prospects of many Southeast Asia states – with China, for example, effectively capable of telling the Philippines where it can and cannot fish or drill for much-needed natural gas – security can't be ignored. So Japan has been diligently deepening engagement on this front as well. Over the past five years, it has signed key security cooperation agreements with Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Interestingly, its main focus has been on coast guard cooperation, regularly donating vessels and surveillance equipment and conducting trainings with Southeast Asian states. This makes sense because Japan's own coast guard is the only thing comparable in size, sophistication and uses to China's. And given that Southeast Asian states have little hope of or interest in trying to deter Chinese encroachment with naval force, support in the maritime surveillance and policing realm is where there's most potential for tangible cooperation.

The security assistance, combined with Japan's deep economic footprint in the region and leeriness of Chinese coercion, has fostered no small amount of public goodwill in the region. This should not be taken as a given. Despite Japan spending much of the past century apologizing for its World War II abuses, there's still a broad understanding of what a fully remilitarized Japan is capable of doing. Still, basically anywhere outside South Korea and, to a much lesser extent, Malaysia, Japan performs remarkably well in public opinion polls, especially compared to China. Surveys show public support for deepened security cooperation with Japan in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand typically well above 50 percent. This matters because it means doing business with Japan or deepening security cooperation simply doesn't carry anywhere near the same political risks as with China.

But how much does a steady, savvy and popular Japan matter to the Indo-Pacific balance of power if, whether because of a lack of will or capability, it can't shed the constraints on its conventional military power? If we're talking about a scenario in which Japan is, for whatever reason, expected to effectively replace the U.S. as guarantor of regional stability, its prospects would be rather bleak.

As it stands, the Japan Self-Defense Forces are a superb complementary force tailored to operate close to home in tight coordination with the United States. To replicate the roles that the United States presently plays, Japan would need to dramatically reorient its force structure and procurement priorities, shed steep legal constraints and increase spending indefinitely (and go nuclear, for that matter). It won’t happen fast. In a conflict in the East China Sea in the next decade, Japan would be unable to rely on partners like India and Australia to fill the void. Even if the countries were fully committed to Japan’s defense, their forces would be too far away to help. Their ability to disrupt Chinese maritime shipping in their respective areas could deter Chinese aggression elsewhere. But if Beijing was willing to accept the cost and focus simply on blowing a hole in the containment line through the East China Sea, Japan may be overmatched.

On the other hand, a big reason Japan has fallen so far behind China in terms of conventional power is it simply doesn't believe it will ever find itself in such a situation. If it truly felt there were a realistic possibility of being forced to stand alone against China, it would almost certainly be moving much more aggressively to tap into its immense latent military potential. If it didn't see things that way when the U.S. was bogged down in the Middle East during the first two decades of the millennium – or when the U.S. was loudly threatening to withdraw from its alliance structure in Northeast Asia a few years ago – it's even less likely to do so now that political, economic and military stakeholders in the U.S. are champing at the bit for a more aggressive confrontation with China.

Japan could, of course, be wrong in this regard. And if it is, the consequences could be devastating. But as it stands, it makes more sense for Tokyo to focus on bolstering the alliance structure – on making itself and multilateralism in general indispensable to U.S. grand strategy – particularly by filling gaps that tend to be left open by the United States. In other words, Japan's ideal role is running point on regional trade and investment integration, courting peripheral regional powers like India and Australia into closer alignment, and remaining uniquely equipped and willing to meet Southeast Asia's material needs directly. At the end of the day, most regional governments would rather not have things change that much, while China needs to fundamentally overturn the status quo to fulfill its strategic imperatives. Japan is thus operating from a tremendous advantage, so long as the broader alliance structure holds.

[DougMacG]

Yes.  Japan needs to be the steady "counterweight to China’s expansion" as the US becomes the unreliable partner in the alliance.

How many conflicting messages have we sent to China about our response to the impending invasion of Taiwan?

Would Japan step in?

https://tfiglobalnews.com/2021/05/06/first-step-towards-military-alliance-japan-and-taiwan-team-up-in-the-east-china-sea-to-check-chinese-belligerence/

[Crafty_Dog]

March 21, 2022
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Japan’s Chances at Regional Leadership

The country might be approaching its first good opportunity in the 21st century to regain the position of regional leader.
By: Victoria Herczegh

The war in Ukraine is a timely reminder that no matter what else may be happening in the world, China and Japan, the heavyweights of the Asia-Pacific, cannot be overlooked. They have the region’s largest economies and boast strong, dynamically developing militaries. It’s little wonder, then, that China and Japan are often compared with one another, especially with regard to regional leadership.

About a year and a half ago, most would have cited China as the leader. But power is relative, and history and geopolitics give Japan just as strong a claim. Over the past century, there were several eras in which Japan was categorically stronger. China overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in the world only after Japan’s own economic miracle ended. And considering China’s own economic problems, there’s no reason to think that Japan can’t reclaim the mantle once again.

Both countries started their modern evolution similarly, first by adhering to an isolationist foreign policy that enabled them to develop into thriving, wealthy nations. Then when they opened up to the West, they faced the harsh reality of competing with powers whose interests conflicted with their own, and introduced new challenges at home that would undermine their domestic positions and thus hinder their ability to project power abroad. For China, this culminated in the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60). For Japan, it culminated in World War II. The defeat of both at the hands of the West doused their ambitions, to say the least.


(click to enlarge)

After the initial shock of losing their regional status, both nations had to reckon with their new station in the world. And because both relied heavily on international trade – China imported agricultural products and manufactured goods, while Japan imported raw materials – neither had the luxury of isolationism. Even so, both managed to perform astonishingly quick economic development. China’s unprecedented growth began with Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power in 1978. China harnessed the power of large-scale capital investment from home and abroad, while Japan leveraged foreign capital with strict government economic regulation: increases in capital and labor, reallocation of labor from agriculture, improved technology and economies of scale. In short, they overcame similar obstacles, emerging from historic losses with the ability to amass enough power to solidify their positions as economic, political and military players of the East Asian region.

But the good times were not to last. The kind of miraculous economic growth that Japan and China managed to achieve comes at a cost, and after a few decades, cracks began to form in the foundations of their models. For Japan, it came at the beginning of the 1990s, after nearly 50 years of economic boom. Bubbles burst, the stock market tanked, a debt crisis ensued and the banking system was utterly dysfunctional in what came to be known as the Lost Decade. Bad as the crisis was, it’s impressive in that it wasn’t worse. The economy shrank, and the stimulus policies that followed racked up a ton of debt, but things never got so bad that they were irreversible. And since the 2000s, Tokyo has done well enough to make up for lost time. Take a look at its gross domestic product per working-age adult. (Overall GDP is misleading in Japan, considering its high percentage of elderly citizens.) Judging by those numbers, especially considering the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can find another miracle: After some struggle to return consumption to pre-crash levels during the 2010s, the Japanese economy finally managed to return to slow but steady growth starting from 2018. GDP is even expected to grow by an average of 3 percent in 2022.


(click to enlarge)

Overlooked in its success is Japanese society itself. The same monocultural, collectivistic, hard-working society that managed to keep up with Western economies once it was exposed to competition, the society that adopted Western strategies into its economy so well that it soon came out on top, the society that could endure the hardest blow imaginable – Hiroshima – and performed its economic miracle within a few years. An island nation that is organized for collectivism means that any measure that is implemented will be complied with at extraordinary speed. That and the outstanding Japanese work ethic is the reason why keiretsu, a system that would have led to certain complications and eventual failure in any other country, could become so successful in Japan. Japan is not without constraints. Its main geopolitical imperative is to always maintain a strong military and economic alliance with the United States, but given this dependence, the East Asian country has not been in the right power position to become a regional leader.

Moreover, Japan has a complex, co-dependent relationship with the current regional leader, China. They are extremely important economic partners, even as Japan actively works to counter growing Chinese assertiveness. For example, Japan has grown more active within the framework of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an alliance including Japan, the U.S., India and Australia, which has gained new traction as a grouping designed to counter China’s push across the Asia-Pacific. It’s part of a broader trend of Japan growing more active in international affairs more generally. Tokyo has increased its military budget and often holds drills, usually joint ones with other countries, to show off its dynamically developing Self-Defense Forces. It was among the first non-European countries to join the sanctions imposed on Russia and has also offered to accept people displaced by the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Japan also has good relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a whole as well as with its member states respectively. Recently, Japan has been increasingly active in nurturing those bilateral ties, not only increasing their already prosperous trade relations but also strengthening security alliances with the smaller countries of the region.

However, now the situation seems to be changing for both countries. China is facing serious internal structural issues that have already forced it to put its expansionism on hold. Despite the hype about China bouncing back quickly from its lockdown, the pandemic has not helped its economic situation. Like the rest of the world, it has encountered major supply chain disruptions with shortages of electronic chips, coal, steel and shipping capacity causing power shortages and shutdowns. Furthermore, the property sector, which supports around 25 percent of China’s GDP, is still struggling. With major players such as Evergrande overloaded with debt, prices for new homes are falling and construction has slowed significantly. The trade war with the U.S. has shown China that the old export-led growth model is unreliable and that it needs to move up the value chain by focusing more on exports with higher value added. Many low value-added operations have already relocated to Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia.

The wide range of issues has caused China to increasingly focus inward on its national goal of “common prosperity.” Consequently, it has deemphasized the security and military components of its foreign policy and focused on international trade and political policies that directly affect the domestic population. These moves have contributed to rising animosity and trade tensions with the U.S. Likewise, in stark contrast to Japan, China has moderated its international activity. Its domestic constraints are reducing its ability to project power outward, while Japan is taking advantage of its solid alliance with the U.S. and newfound economic strength to be more open and active, keeping its goals of taking leadership in the Asia-Pacific region in clear sight. Japan has proved its capability of seizing and keeping the position of regional leader, and this might be its first good opportunity in the 21st century to do so again.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1881409/japan-should-retake-japanese-land-from-russia

[Crafty_Dog]

Rising Support for Nuclear Power Will Help, but Won’t Ensure, Japan Hits Its Climate Goals
8 MIN READApr 6, 2022 | 19:22 GMT





Reactor buildings and water storage tanks are seen at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, on March 5, 2022 -- nearly 11 years after a massive earthquake triggered a devastating meltdown.

Reactor buildings and water storage tanks are seen at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, on March 5, 2022 -- nearly 11 years after a massive earthquake caused a devastating meltdown at the plant.

(CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)

Rising popular support for nuclear energy will make it politically easier for Japan to restart some of its reactors, but Tokyo will nonetheless struggle to hit its nuclear power-related goals in its climate and energy strategies. A poll released in March by the Japanese outlet Nikkei found that 53% of respondents supported restarting nuclear power plants, compared with 44% in a similar poll released in September. Nikkei has carried out the poll semiannually since 2011 and the March 2022 poll was the first to find a majority supporting restarting nuclear reactors.

In the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that caused three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to meltdown, Japan shut down all of its 54 nuclear reactors to increase safety standards and reform its nuclear safety and security regulations.

In 2015, Japan started bringing back online some of the reactors that passed the country's new standards. But public opposition and the bureaucratic challenges of fulfilling the new safety requirements have slowed this process. Today, only 10 of the country's 33 operable nuclear reactors have been brought online, and even some of those are currently offline due to various reasons like maintenance.

Nuclear power accounted for about 25% percent of Japan's power generation in 2010. But in 2019, it accounted for only 6%, according to Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Factors including high energy prices and electricity shortages are driving Japanese citizens and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's (LDP) growing support of nuclear power. The Nikkei poll's release came after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Tohoku on March 16 knocked six thermal power plants offline, some of which could remain offline for months. The outage caused the Japanese government to issue a power outage alert in the Tokyo region on March 22 for the first time after the Tokyo Electric Power Co. projected that its operating reserves would fall to 0%. Ultimately, a blackout was avoided, but Japan's inability to cope with the plants going offline highlights how exposed the Japanese power sector remains to external forces. If most of Japan's nuclear power plants had been online, the risk of a blackout would have been minimal.

Japan is currently suffering from limited spare capacity in its power sector after the electricity retail market was liberalized in 2016, opening up power producers to higher competition. In response, many utilities closed power plants that could not compete in the liberalized market. The majority of those closed power plants were old oil-fired plants that were brought back online to replace Japan's nuclear power plants after the 2011 earthquake. As a result, Japan's national power generating capacity has declined by 23% since 2016, making the country highly vulnerable to shortages if another natural disaster knocks off several power plants at once (like the 2022 earthquake did) or if abnormally cold weather causes a surge in demand.

Japan's higher reliance on natural gas and coal for power generation has made consumers more exposed to global price shocks. Given this, restarting nuclear power reactors may be the cheapest way to boost generation capacity and reduce domestic electricity costs. According to the latest figures available from the Japanese industry ministry, thermal power plants (which continuously burn through natural gas or coal) generated more than 80% of Japan's electricity in 2019. In the short term, these thermal power plants have higher marginal costs of electricity production than other power sources, including nuclear power plants (which have extremely low marginal costs of production in comparison and do not continuously burn through feedstock). Japan's high reliance on thermal power plants also leaves it highly exposed to price swings on imported coal and natural gas. Restarting nuclear power plants is the cheapest and quickest way for Japan to address these challenges. Nuclear power's low operating costs are often offset by the high startup costs of constructing the power plants. But for Japanese power producers, the plants are already built and operable, making them an attractive lower-cost alternative to quickly boost power generation capacity.

The global fallout from the ongoing war in Ukraine has further increased energy prices in Japan, where consumers were already facing rising electricity bills prior to Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. In March, nine of Japan's regional electric utilities increased power rates to their highest levels in more than five years.

Growing popular support for restarting Japan's nuclear power plants will be crucial for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the LDP's ambitious climate and energy strategy. When Kishida took office in October, he appointed a number of pro-nuclear LDP politicians to cabinet positions, pitching nuclear power as crucial for Japan's strategy to reduce emissions by 2030. This marks a noted shift from his predecessor Yoshihide Suga, whose cabinet included powerful anti-nuclear voices Taro Aso and Shinjiro Koizumi as deputy prime minister and environmental minister, respectively. In October, Kishida's government approved a new strategic energy plan aimed at making nuclear energy account for 20-22% of Japan's power mix in 2030. The plan also lays out a roadmap for Japan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and includes a target to reduce emissions by 46% by 2030 from 2013 levels. LDP officials say that hitting the 2030 emissions reduction target will require bringing 30 of Japan's 33 operable nuclear reactors back online.


But even with more popular and political support, there are significant hurdles for Japan to make nuclear power a key contributor to its power generation beyond 2030:

Safety regulations: Japan's safety regulations, for one, make it difficult for power companies to secure approval to restart reactors. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority, which was set up after the 2011 disaster, has been slow to issue new approvals and has pushed back against calls by pro-nuclear Japanese political figures like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to expedite the approval process. Between 2018 and 2021, the authority did not approve a restart of a single reactor. This means that Kishida and his ruling LDP's growing support for nuclear power may not necessarily translate to an easier certification process for bringing reactors back online.

Aging infrastructure: Another big challenge facing Japan's long-term energy strategy is the fact that many of its nuclear power plants are aging. Under Japanese regulations, nuclear reactors can receive a 40-year license that can be extended by an additional 20 years, bringing the total life of a reactor to 60 years. Several of Japan's reactors will reach the 60-year lifespan in the 2030s or 2040s, and only about 20 will remain in operation by 2050 under the new rules. Japan is considering extending the lifetime of its nuclear reactors beyond 60 years as a way to forestall a decline in nuclear power generation capacity in the 2040s, in anticipation of popular opposition to building new reactors. Thus far, the Kishida government has given little indication that it would back building new reactors. But the energy strategy it approved in October was inherited from the less pro-nuclear Suga government and is one that Japan amends every three years. It is possible that growing support for nuclear power could lead to Kishida and other parts of the LDP supporting building new reactors to replace older ones, which is something that former Prime Minister Abe called for.

Local opposition: Finally, even though there may be national support for restarting reactors, local mayors and populations in areas where the power plants are located may oppose restarts. And under Japan's rules, power companies must receive local consent to restart power plants.
If it struggles to restart old nuclear reactors and/or build new ones, Japan may not hit its 2030 and 2050 climate targets. This would force the country to rely on more costly abatement measures to reduce emissions — costs that might get passed on to households and businesses. Without nuclear power growing as a proportion of its energy mix, Japan will remain dependent on thermal power plants in 2030, likely requiring some of its power producers to start investing more in abatement technologies, like carbon capture and sequestration, to reduce emissions, driving up investment costs. If Japan does not build more reactors or extend the lifetime of its existing nuclear reactors, hitting Tokyo's climate goals will likely require replacing a significant amount of the country's thermal power with alternative zero-emissions energy sources beyond solar and wind. Investment into such technologies is not cheap, meaning that many power companies will eventually pass along the costs to consumers to fund the investments.

Although Japan has substantial offshore wind power potential, its onshore geography has terrain challenges and somewhat limited space for new solar and wind power plants. Given the intermittent power supply from solar and wind, Japan would also still need a feedstock-based power source to make up for the gaps in energy generation that grid-scale batteries storing wind and solar energy cannot.

Compared with wind and solar, hydrogen- and ammonia-based renewable fuels offer more promise for Japan, but grid-scale power generation from these sources remains in its infancy. Japanese companies and the government are investing heavily in both ammonia and hydrogen options. In 2021, Japanese engineering firm Mitsubishi Power announced that it had begun development on a 40-megawatt (MW) class gas turbine that is fueled by 100% ammonia, which the company aims to commercialize in 2025. The plant would be the world's first power plant to exclusively be fueled by ammonia. In the energy strategy it approved in October, the Japanese government said that 10% of the country's electricity mix by 2050 could come from hydrogen- or ammonia-fired power plants. But it still says that 30-40% of the electricity mix would still need to come from thermal or nuclear power plants.

[DougMacG]

Fukushima cows, at 11, in perfect health.  Their life expectancy before the meltdown was two years.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2018/12/c7bfef30a12a-focus-farmers-struggle-to-keep-cows-left-behind-near-fukushima-plant.html

BTW, it was the diesel generators that failed in the tsunami. That breach was not necessary.
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/#:~:text=At%20the%20four%20damaged%20nuclear,were%20obliterated%20by%20the%20tsunami.

[Crafty_Dog]

June 3, 2022
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Japan’s Return to History?
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

After World War II, the United States wrote a constitution for Japan that stated, in Article 9, that Japan would not maintain a military in the future. Over time, the article was modified to allow certain exceptions, which was fine by Washington. At the height of the Cold War, Japan blocked Russian access to the Pacific and as a result Japan may be attacked by the Soviet Union, or so the thinking went. Japan, then, could have a military, but one that was forbidden from acting beyond self-defense. The creation of its Self-Defense Forces meant that the United States was not solely responsible for defending Japan or for keeping Russia out of the Pacific.

The Self-Defense Forces grew into a significant military force. Though the constitution barred Japan from engaging in foreign wars, Article 9 itself was protected by Japanese public opinion. And the Japanese public had no interest in being a military ally of the United States. Washington gently pressed for amending Article 9 but gained no traction. Article 9 protected Japan from engaging in war, and the public wanted to keep it that way.

But things have changed, if not practically then at least psychologically, thanks largely to the war in Ukraine and the constant Chinese threats to invade Taiwan. The conflict in Ukraine showed that war is not unthinkable, whatever the Japanese people might wish. This, in turn, means that Chinese threats are taken more seriously. The possibility of China’s conquest of Taiwan would increase the threat to Japan’s south, and also might embolden China for further conquests. Japan has an interest in blocking this conquest, and the United States indicated that it expects Japan to share the risk.

Indeed, just last week at a press conference with U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said of an invasion of Taiwan, “Attempts to change the status quo by force, like Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, should never be tolerated in the Indo-Pacific, above all, in East Asia.” He also spoke ambiguously of the need to “strengthen the deterrence and response of the Japan-U.S. alliance.” It’s difficult to say what precisely he meant by the statement. In truth, Japan has been laying the groundwork to increase its capabilities, if it believes a war with China is imminent or that the U.S. could abandon it. It’s also been procuring weapons systems that blur the line between offensive and defensive, spending more on defense, and trying to reinvigorate the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. If we take Kishida’s latest statement at face value, then he has essentially said Japan accepts the possibility of waging war, without acknowledging that this in any way violated Article 9.

This would be a notable departure for a country that has not been militarily active since World War II. A commitment to Taiwan requires (at least) the assurance of supply lines and access to Taiwan in the event of a conflict. That means China’s navy must (at least) patrol the waters south of the Korean Peninsula along the coast of China to Taiwan. Both sides would vie for control of sea lanes, even as China might be pulled into waters farther away. In any event, all this creates another complicated dimension to an already complex Chinese mission to Taiwan.

Japan is not a weak country. Its economy ranks third in the world. And although China’s gross domestic product is much higher than Japan’s, China's per capita GDP is much lower. This means that the average Japanese citizen is much better off than the average Chinese citizen, and that Japan is more socially stable than China. The recent declines in China’s economy will take time to reverse. Japan is more likely to stabilize its economy since the crisis has a lower impact on average Japanese.

Japan also has the advantage of social stability deriving not only from economics but also from cultural forces. Japan is built on both organizational principle and social obligation. It emerged from the catastrophe of World War II and the atomic bombings with a shaken but not broken sense of order, in which respect for authority, whether the government or teachers, is powerful. It survived the Lost Decade with a degree of social stability that would not be seen in other countries. As a measure of power, this social stability gives Japan the ability to weather reversals without breaking.

To accept the burden of defending Taiwan is to demonstrate the degree to which Japan can maneuver militarily. And that in turn makes the third-largest economy in the world, one with a growing military and social solidarity, go from a regional power to potentially a global power. I don’t think it’s there quite yet, but for many nations, global power is impossible. Not so for Japan.

I wrote a long time ago in my book "The Next 100 Years" that Japan would emerge as a major regional and perhaps global power. I see the decision to commit to the defense of Taiwan – if indeed that is Kishida’s aim – as a major stepping stone in this direction. Japan avoided the game for many years, and this may well be its return to history. It will now face the painful price of being responsible.

[Crafty_Dog]

Reflecting on Shinzo Abe’s Legacy, Part 1: Early Influence and Ideology
undefined and Senior VP of Strategic Analysis
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
9 MIN READJul 15, 2022 | 19:18 GMT





Shinzo Abe visits Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam’s Kilo Pier in Honolulu, Hawaii on Dec. 27, 2016. Abe was the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor with a U.S. president and the first to visit the USS Arizona Memorial cataloging the toll of the 1941 attack.
Shinzo Abe visits Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam’s Kilo Pier in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Dec. 27, 2016. Abe was the first Japanese prime minister to visit Pearl Harbor with a U.S. president and the first to visit the USS Arizona Memorial.

(Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

Editor’s Note: This assessment is the first of a two-part series that explores the life and legacy of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated while giving a speech at a political rally on July 8.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have failed in many of his domestic reform initiatives. But his conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific as a single strategic region remains a potent concept that will leave an enduring mark on geopolitics.

Remembering Abe
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be remembered for many things. To some, he was seen as a right-wing nationalist, visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine (where among others several Class A war criminals are interred) and trying (unsuccessfully) to revise the Japanese Constitution to remove constraints on the military. To others, he was the driver of “Abenomics,” an evolving economic policy aimed at reflating the Japanese economy, spurring industry, and addressing Japan’s demographic crisis.

Abe was Japan’s first prime minister born after the end of World War II. He was also the longest-serving prime minister in modern Japanese history. As a key member of Japan’s new conservatives, Abe championed a view that Japan should break free from both its post-war constraints and decades of economic stagnation, and take its rightful place as a proactive leader in Asia and beyond.

Abe emerged as a politician at a volatile time, winning his first Diet seat in 1993, just four years after the death of the Showa Emperor and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bursting of Japan’s financial bubble. The end of the Cold War and heightened economic competition with the United States left Tokyo unsure of Washington’s future commitment to defend Japan. The end of the Japanese miracle and the descent into economic malaise also left Tokyo unsure if it would be able to defend itself. Abe and other new conservatives saw this as proof that Japan needed to be reborn, to adapt to a post-Cold War world, and to take control of its own destiny or risk getting left behind.

Abe was both a nationalist and a globalist, a defender of traditional Japanese culture and the increased involvement of women and foreigners in the workforce, and a backer of an independent defense capability and simultaneously closer security ties with the United States. His contradictions highlighted an ability to adapt to the shifting geopolitical context of the region and the world. While unsuccessful in many of the changes he sought, Abe at times dragged Japan out of its inward focus and into a recognition of the need to adapt to an assertive China, a distracted United States, and a global system in flux. His legacy will remain disputed, but his vision, policies, and actions highlight the need and space for middle powers to reshape their role in the evolving multipolar global system. Abe’s most enduring legacy, however, is less national than international: the idea of the Indo-Pacific as a single geopolitical framework.

Like (Grand)father, Like (Grand)son
Abe was heavily influenced by his grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi was a member of the Tojo government, an economic administrator in the Manchukuo puppet state, and a suspected war criminal imprisoned by the American forces after the war. But Kishi was rehabilitated along with numerous other members of the wartime government as the emerging Cold War brought rapid changes in U.S. relations with Japan. Amid the fear of spreading communism, and later followed by the outbreak of the Korean War, Washington sought the cooperation of right-wing politicians and administrators in Japan (and neighboring Korea), and pushed to rapidly rebuild Japan’s industrial capacity and economy to support U.S. strategic aims in the Asia-Pacific. Kishi was released from prison in 1948, and less than a decade later, he was appointed prime minister of Japan.

From the start, Kishi sought to overturn or at least revise the U.S.-written Japanese Constitution, particularly Article 9, which denied Tokyo the right to a military and thus significantly constrained Japan’s ability to defend itself and its interests. This wasn’t necessarily driven by a desire to rebuild Imperial Japan, but rather a desire for Japan to be reintegrated into the international community as a normal nation, to move past the humiliation of defeat, and to allow Japan the ability to identify and secure its own strategic interests.

In pursuing Japan’s full independence, Kishi showcased another concept that would shape Abe’s ideals — the desire to rebuild strong leadership in Japan, to interpret democracy not as the leaders following the people, but as the leaders guiding the nation. Both Kishi and later Abe saw the government's primary role as protecting Japan's strategic interests and independence, even if the voters were not necessarily ready for some of the changes to economic or defense policies. Neither Kishi nor his grandson was ultimately able to change the Japanese Constitution. But Abe, in particular, oversaw numerous re-interpretations of Article 9 that significantly altered the capability and reach of the Japanese defense forces.

The Shaping of Abe’s Ideology
Abe was also heavily influenced by his study and interpretation of the mid-19th century Meiji Restoration, which had revived the central role of the emperor, broke the back of the shogunate, and adapted foreign ideas to strengthen Japan internally and ultimately pave the way for the country to compete as a modern nation with the Americans, Russians, and Europeans. For Abe, restoration wasn’t just a social, economic, or security concept, it also carried on to deep government reform. This would require overcoming entrenched interests in a status quo Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Much of the groundwork was done before Abe even took office. Prior to rising to the post of Prime Minister, Abe served in the government of Junichiro Koizumi, who actively sought to break his own ruling LDP, which had evolved into a ponderous set of factional fiefdoms, ruled through backroom deals and tied into a bureaucracy and industry that left efficiency and innovation by the wayside and seemed to work only to keep the LDP in power.

Koizumi shook up both the bureaucracy and the LDP, bringing in young and often untested new politicians to stand for seats in the Diet, drawing on populism to press forward his agenda. Koizumi was so successful at disrupting the party and traditional politics that, after being the longest serving Prime Minister since the 1970s, he was followed by three short-lived LDP governments (Abe’s first term among them), and then the loss of leadership to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The lesson for Abe was finding the right balance between the necessity of the bureaucracy as a stabilizing force, and the need for innovation and adaptability in a rapidly shifting region and world.

Abe's study of Japanese history also drove him to focus on education reform. Abe saw Japanese education and its continued focus on pacifism and critique of Japan’s past as undermining Japanese patriotism and social strength. For Japan to compete in the new world, it needed proud citizens who loved their nation and worked toward its success. Abe and his factional partners played an important role in the revision of Japanese textbooks, which often sparked criticism from South Korea and China, where these changes were seen as glorifying Japan’s militaristic past and failing to accept responsibility or apologize for past actions. But for Abe, it was time to move on. Japan had already suffered for its past, and it didn’t need to forever walk with its head down. From Abe’s perspective, Tokyo certainly didn’t need to be cowed by Seoul and Beijing, or even its key partner, the United States.

Another area Abe gravitated toward was the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea. While the incidents were largely things of the past by the time Abe was in the Diet and government, the kidnappings highlighted Japan’s inability to defend its own citizens against foreign aggression. The Japanese government believed at least 17 citizens were abducted by North Korean agents, most forced to work as language and culture instructors in North Korea. Abe used the abduction issue to compel Tokyo to take a harder line toward North Korea, particularly as Pyongyang carried out maritime incursions in Japanese waters and accelerated its missile and later nuclear weapons programs. Washington’s initial disinterest in the abduction issue further highlighted the need for Japan to take greater responsibility for its own security, and that meant changing rules and regulations around the Self Defense Forces (SDF).

Finally, building off of his grandfather’s ideas of economic and social policy (and watching as Japan slid into long-term stagnation), Abe sought to revitalize the Japanese economy as a way to ensure national strength. But Abe’s economic ideas were poorly defined during his first short-lived term as prime minister. He had little economic experience, and it wasn’t until well into the 2000s that he linked up with reflation advocates and put significant effort into understanding and shaping a coherent economic policy - what would later emerge as “Abenomics.”

Early on, Abe understood the need for a strong economy as a necessary prerequisite for a strong, independent nation. But it took his failure as a first-term prime minister and observing the impact on Japan of the global financial crisis to compel a deeper study of economics. This would also shape Abe’s views on women in the labor force and the need to accept and expand skilled migrant labor — ideas that seemed to contradict his more traditionalist social mores.

Check back next week for part two of this series, in which we’ll explore the geopolitical and strategic context (and impact) of Abe’s eight-year term as prime minister.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2529171/japan-must-prepare-for-war

[Crafty_Dog]

Planning ahead. Japan is considering deploying hundreds of cruise missiles to some of its islands to increase its counterattack capabilities against the Chinese. The long-range missiles would be deployed to the Nansei Islands and Kyushu and are capable of reaching major targets on the Chinese coast. Tokyo is also planning to extend the range of its domestically produced surface-to-ship missiles. The announcement comes as two Japanese politicians arrived in Taiwan on Monday to discuss enhancing security and defense ties.

[Crafty_Dog]

Japan and Russia. Japanese imports of liquefied natural gas from Russia continue to rise despite Tokyo's imposition of sanctions on Moscow. According to estimates by the Japanese Ministry of Finance, LNG supplies from Russia increased by 211.2 percent in August compared with a year ago.

Japan and the U.S. Japan’s defense minister and the U.S. secretary of defense on Thursday agreed to launch joint research into hypersonic weapons defense systems amid China’s growing hypersonic missile capabilities. Japan is a key U.S. ally in the region and has moved to expand its military capabilities in recent years.

[Crafty_Dog]

Arms race. Over the next five years, Japan will undertake its largest arms buildup since World War II, an anonymous senior government official said. The main goal is to deter China. In December, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will present details of the country’s defense budget and security strategy for the coming years.

[Crafty_Dog]

Global Tensions Spur a Sea Change in Japan
Public opinion polls show more than 60% support for higher military spending.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
Nov. 28, 2022 6:24 pm ET
Tokyo

Riots in China, deepening war in Ukraine, continuing upheavals in Iran: It’s been a dramatic week in world affairs. But the quiet revolutions sometimes matter more. Japan is one of the stablest countries on earth, and there are no crowds in the streets as bureaucrats shuffle papers and write reports.

Nevertheless, what is in those reports will have a massive impact on world politics—and could well determine the outcome of the U.S.-China competition.

Germany’s Zeitenwende, or historical turning point—the abandonment of appeasement as the basis of Russia policy and a shift toward greater military spending—has received more attention. But as I learned on a recent visit to Tokyo, the shifts taking place in Japan go further and rest on a wider consensus than anything happening in Berlin.

The pandemic years saw a steady increase in political and military tension in Japan’s neighborhood. Fiery rhetoric from China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats was frequently aimed at Japan. North Korea stepped up its missile program. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shocked a public firmly committed to the post-World War II framework of international law based on the United Nations Charter. China’s support of Russia’s invasion stunned Japanese observers and drove home the danger that China could launch an attack on Taiwan.

A new national-security strategy is expected to be released before the end of the year, and Japanese and foreign observers alike expect it to be a scorcher. Japan is on course to double defense spending, embrace “counterstrike” weapons that would give Japan-based missiles the ability to strike targets on mainland Asia, develop a world-class arms industry based on cutting-edge technology, and upgrade its self-defense forces into one of the world’s most powerful militaries.


Japan turned a corner during the past three years. Public opinion, once resolutely pacifist, has shifted. Polls now show more than 60% support for higher military spending. Officials who previously sought to avoid characterizing China as a threat now speak candidly about the need to counter China and, if necessary, to defend Taiwan. Diplomats and military analysts agree that Chinese control of Taiwan and the surrounding waters would seriously damage Japan’s global position. Several people told me that China’s next step after occupying Taiwan would be to press claims to Okinawa. Others said that control over Taiwan and the surrounding waters would give China a strategic chokehold on trade routes vital to Japan.

Many expected Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in the Diet, to embrace a less activist course than his predecessor, Shinzo Abe. But in part because of his previous reputation as a dove, Mr. Kishida has so far pushed the envelope further while encountering less resistance than Abe’s sometimes brash approaches. Even traditional pacifists like longtime Liberal Democratic Party coalition partner Komeito have softened their opposition to a stronger military.

What happens in Tokyo matters. Japan is America’s single most important ally, and the strategic bond between the two powers is the foundation of America’s position in the Indo-Pacific. Japan’s decision to double down on its American alliance while building up its own capabilities is a major setback for China’s effort to reshape East Asia. In the Philippines and Southeast Asia, Japanese investment and trade help counter China’s economic power. Japanese diplomacy, less hectoring and more culturally sensitive than America’s sometimes abrasive preaching on issues like human rights, is often more effective in Asian capitals. The steady development of closer Japanese relations with India and Australia has been a major factor behind the rapid evolution of the Quad.

Much remains to be done. Japanese-Korean relations, despite some improvements under South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, remain difficult. Japan itself, with a stagnant economy and the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, will be hard put to sustain the necessary military buildup.

But at this point it is the U.S. that must do more to secure the peace of East Asia. Given the long military supply lines across the Pacific and the likely difficulty of providing supplies if hostilities break out, the U.S. should position substantial quantities of weapons and supplies in the region. American as well as Taiwanese and Japanese officials told me that current stockpiles are woefully insufficient.

Beyond that, Washington still needs a regional economic strategy. Expanding economic integration between the U.S. and friendly Asian economies is an essential dimension of any long-term policy for the Indo-Pacific.

America’s unique ability to attract powerful allies around the world remains critical to our national security and the values we cherish. The Japanese strategic awakening is historic, and Americans should do everything we can to support it.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK54VH_IE5s

[Crafty_Dog]

The Sleeping Japanese Giant Awakes
Tokyo rolls out the most important shift in defense strategy and spending since World War II.
By The Editorial Board


Dec. 16, 2022 6:38 pm ET

History is on speed-dial these days, and the latest seismic shift is Japan’s announcement Friday of a new defense strategy and the spending to implement it. This is an historic change, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida deserves credit for taking the political risk to educate his country about the growing threats from China and North Korea and how to deter them.

Tokyo said it will increase defense spending to 2% of the economy by 2027, double the roughly 1% now. The accompanying strategy documents are right to call the current moment “the most severe and complex security environment” since the end of World War II.

The strategy explicitly mentions the “challenge” from Beijing. Recall that five Chinese ballistic missiles landed in Japan’s nearby waters in August. North Korea routinely lobs missiles over the islands. Tokyo says it will prepare “for the worst-case scenario.”

Notably, the strategy calls for acquiring longer-range missiles that can strike enemy launch-sites and ships, perhaps including the purchase of some 500 U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. This is the kind of capability that forces other countries to think twice before attacking a sovereign neighbor.

Also welcome is the focus on the vulnerability of East Asia’s first island chain, from southern Japan to Taiwan. China is intensifying “military activities around Taiwan,” the strategy says, and “the overall military balance between China and Taiwan” is moving rapidly in China’s favor. The fate of Taiwan matters enormously to Japan’s ability to defend itself, especially its peripheral islands.

The documents promise to procure more naval vessels and fighter aircraft, as well as more investment in cyber. All of this will complement American efforts to rearm, assuming the U.S. can follow through on priorities such as expanding the Navy’s attack submarine inventory, building more long-range munitions, and putting these assets in the Pacific. One start would be restoring permanent U.S. fighters at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.

Beijing predictably railed against Japan’s new strategy, but it has itself to blame. It hasn’t controlled its proxy North Korea’s missile launches and nuclear program. Neighbors are alarmed by its aggressive moves in the East and South China seas, border skirmishes with India, bullying of Australia and others, and especially threats against Taiwan. As the world’s third-largest economy, Japan has the wealth to do something to counter China.

The new strategy amounts to a revolution in Japanese domestic politics, essentially transcending its postwar pacifist constitution. It builds on the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of a Japan that sheds its postwar reluctance to build a strong military. Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, says a political shift of this magnitude might normally take a decade to accomplish. But the public mood changed rapidly amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing aggression.

The new strategy anchors Japan firmly in the U.S. alliance. Tokyo is America’s most important ally, and a militarily stronger Japan will enhance deterrence in the Pacific.

[Crafty_Dog]

Daily Memo: Moscow's Warnings to Tokyo
The Kremlin sees Japan's move toward militarization as a barrier to peace negotiations.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Russian warnings. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko warned against Japan’s move toward militarization, saying Moscow may be forced to take retaliatory measures. Among the changes Rudenko said ran counter to Tokyo's “peaceful development” are large-scale military exercises near Russian borders, the adoption of updated defense doctrines and large increases in military spending. He called the moves “a serious challenge for the security of our country and the Asia-Pacific region” and said negotiations on a peace treaty to formally end World War II hostilities would not be possible if Tokyo doesn’t abandon its “anti-Russian course.”

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/28/threat-china-prompts-major-military-buildup-japan-/