by Simon Korner

In September 2022, the Japanese government announced its intention to restore Japan to military greatness, beginning its largest re-armament programme since the end of World War 2.

IMPERIAL AMBITIONS

The revival of Japanese martial ambitions is a sobering prospect, in particular for those countries that fell victim to its colonial brutality last century. China lost 20 million people, mostly civilians, killed by Japan during its long war of occupation starting in Manchuria in 1932. Korea’s population endured slave labour, mass rape and forced deportations for more than three decades from 1912 under Japanese colonial rule.The fact that Japan has never acknowledged its war-crimes makes the danger more stark. At the provocative annual ceremony this year to honour Japan’s World War 2 war dead at the Yakasuni shrine, Japan once again refused to mention or apologise for Japanese wartime atrocities.

The immediate purpose of Japanese re-armament is to prepare for war against China, with Japan joining a US-led axis including Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines – and NATO. The process is already underway: tightening economic sanctions against China; physical encirclement with military bases; and an economically draining arms race. As one of the US’s subordinated allies, Japan is set to play a key role promoting US strategy in East Asia.

For its part, Japan’s ruling circles have long sought to regain the country’s former status as a belligerent country. For the past 80 years, they have chafed under the constraints of its constitution which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”. Japan has never fully held to this renunciation, circumventing it via the fiction that its military was part of the police service, and by insisting that its growing armed forces were strictly defensive in nature. Every move towards so-called normalisation by the Japanese establishment has been gradual so as not to alarm its population, which remains largely opposed to militarisation after having experienced its disastrous consequences during World War 2, in which over 3 million Japanese people were killed.

However, over the past decade, this surreptitious re-armament with military spending pegged at 1% of GDP, has been replaced by more overt steps towards militarisation, testing how far they can push the public. First, in 2014, Japan reinterpreted its constitution to allow it to fight overseas and to do so alongside allies – a far cry from strict self-defence of the homeland inscribed in that constitution. This cleared the way for supporting a future US-led war to break Taiwan away from China.

In 2022, Japan made the more radical constitutional revision of reconfiguring its military into an attacking force. This change required a two-thirds super-majority in parliament, which was made easier by the assassination of the hawkish prime minister Shinzo Abe two days before a national election, allowing the long-time ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, to win the necessary majority. Under its new National Security Strategy Japan’s military spending will double by 2027, making it the world’s third biggest arms spender, after the US and China, up from ninth. Importantly, the new strategy allows it to strike foreign bases pre-emptively.

Thus, Japan’s postwar ambiguity as a “semi-disarmed economic giant, an Asian Germany of sorts”, as historian Rana Mitter has described it, is over. Like Germany, it has entered an arms race to become a major player in close alignment with NATO, spending at least 2% of its GDP on arms. (1) The US ambassador in Tokyo, Rahm Emanuel, welcomed the 2022 change as “a momentous milestone”, while Foreign Affairs journal called it “a profound transformation”, both recognising that it marks a qualitative change.

INTEGRATION WITH US AND NATO

As part of its re-armament drive, Japan is rapidly integrating its military into US command structures. This is the biggest enhancement of the US-Japanese alliance since 1960. Operational control now comes under direct US leadership in Japan, whereas up to now the 54,000 US military personnel based in Japan had to defer to “command and control authority” from a distant base in Hawaii. In effect, the two militaries will operate seamlessly as one body. The pretext is that “quicker joint decision-making and careful coordination of the countries’ defense capabilities” is needed to confront China over Taiwan and North Korea. (2) One top US Marine Corps general in Japan called this “setting the theatre” for the coming conflict, which could be as soon as next year, according to Mike Minihan, General in charge of US Air Mobility Command, who said: “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025”.

Central to Japan’s integration with the US military – which places Japan at the epicentre of US control over the Pacific, eclipsing South Korea – is also a far closer relationship with NATO, which is spreading its tentacles into east Asia. Japan attended the NATO summit in Madrid for the first time in 2022, and in 2023 joined the unprecedently large two-week Air Defender exercise with NATO countries in Europe as part of an ongoing joint military training programme. Japan has also opened a NATO liaison office in Tokyo, a move condemned by China, Russia and also France, which does not want US encroachment on its colonial empire of Pacific islands or damage to its major trading relationship with China. Japan is now the biggest non-member financial supporter of NATO missions. It has spent over $30 million on missions in Ukraine, and a further pledge of $7.1 billion in non-military aid.

RUSSIA AND CHINA

Japan was initially slow to apply anti-Russia sanctions in 2022 because of its important trade with Russia in fuel, cars and machinery. But a year later at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan came out in condemnation of the ‘Special Military Operation’ and imposed sanctions. In return, President Biden declared that the US was “fully, thoroughly, completely committed” to the defence of Japan using all means, including nuclear weapons. Japan’s turnaround extended to its joining another big military exercise, Orient Shield, with the USA near Russia’s border in 2023, provoking a strong diplomatic protest by Russia.

Japan’s view of China has followed a similar trajectory to its relations with Russia, moving from cordial to belligerent. In 2013, when Xi Jinping became China’s president, Japan officially called China a strategic partner – China is Japan’s largest trading partner in both imports and exports. Ten years later, by contrast, Japan labelled China “the greatest strategic challenge in ensuring the peace and security of Japan” and acceded to US demands to shut off the supply of advanced computer chips and the machinery needed for their manufacture to China. China warned that Japan’s policy change risks “conflict and confrontation.” Likewise, Russia said NATO’s advance into Asia will lead to “an escalation in bloc conflicts.”

The tightening structure of Japan’s anti-Chinese alliances includes the Quad, with Australia, India and the USA, and future membership of AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the USA), a bullying alliance that has put Australia under direct US military control and will do the same for Japan. Both countries to be used to strangle China’s trade through the choke-points of the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea, which are China’s main trade gateways.

Meanwhile, as part of its relentless encirclement of China, the US has pushed for a new pact between Japan and the Philippines which allows each country’s troops to be stationed on the other’s territory. This Reciprocal Access Agreement in effect gives Japan back access to the Philippines, which it occupied in World War 2. The agreement is a way of ensuring that the Philippines remain US-compliant.

MILITARY BUILD UP

In practical military terms, Japan has bought 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the US (which has 4,000), and around 150 US advanced fifth-generation aircraft to replace its aging F-2 fighters.

Its burgeoning miliary industrial complex, with Mitsubishi Heavy Industry at its core, is producing the US’s Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, carried by F-35 stealth fighters, and is also building Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles for export back to the USA, which has stockpile shortages because of Ukraine. Exporting weapons has until now been prohibited in Japan. Japan has also converted two large warships into aircraft carriers, the first in Japan’s navy since 1945, ready to carry F-35s. In addition, Britain’s BAE and Japan’s Mitsubishi are producing the new Tempest next-generation stealth plane over the next ten years, as part of the Global Combat Air Programme with Italy. All these massive investments in arms production are reviving Mitsubishi’s World War 2 role as a global weapons manufacturer.

Japan is also deploying over 1,000 long-range Cruise missiles able to reach North Korea and China, and is developing hypersonic weapons for use potentially to seize back Russia’s Southern Kuriles islands which it lost formally in the peace treaties that settled World War 2. In addition, under a recent agreement between Japan and the UK, British troops can be stationed in Japan for joint exercises, such as the one in 2022 which simulated the retaking of an island under enemy control. More ominous still is the proposal to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on Japanese territory. While the US has up to now provided a long-distance nuclear umbrella, it will now place tactical nuclear weapons in its bases in Japan itself. Any strike launched from these bases would risk retaliation, dragging Japan into nuclear conflict again.

Meanwhile, the heavily militarised Japanese island of Okinawa which already hosts 31 US bases will receive a further 2,000 US marines by 2025. Other Japanese islands such as Ishigaki in the far south-west, even closer to Taiwan than Okinawa, will house new missile bases, ready to target China.

Just as Germany was forced by the US in 2022 to cut off relations with Russia, its main supplier of cheap energy, Japan has been co-opted fully into the US war axis at its own expense, forced to spend on arms, essentially to promote US aims. This echoes US policy toward the defeated capitalist class in Germany and Japan after World War 2, which used the rehabilitated industrial leaders, who had backed the fascist regimes, against rising workers’ movements in western Europe and ensured that Japanese attempts in the 1950s to normalise relations with the USSR and China led nowhere. Like Germany, Japan, the only country to have had nuclear weapons used against it, remains effectively an occupied power with 85 US military bases on its territory.

CONFLICTS 

However, in the longer term, unless a world war intervenes, neither Germany and Japan will remain permanently satisfied with subordinate status. A revived Japanese empire will threaten not only North Korea, but South Korea as well, and eventually even its master the USA. South Korea’s president Yoon Suk-yeol raised the alarm, calling Japan’s re-armament “a grave matter”, while a [South] Korea Times editorial demanded that Japan “not forget the lessons of the Pacific War”. The prospect is already driving an arms race among the countries of south-east Asia, in part for fear of renewed Japanese domination.

To clear the way for its rising power, Japan is tearing up not only the its pacifist constitution but the main World War 2 peace treaty it signed as the terms of its surrender – the Potsdam Proclamation of 1945 – which stated that all foreign territories and islands occupied by Japan, including Taiwan, would be restored to their former owners, in particular, China and Russia. Under the Proclamation, Japan’s current claims to the Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea, only 100 miles north of Taiwan, and to Russia’s Kurile islands, have no basis in international law and are clearly acts of expansionist aggression.

OPPOSITION IN JAPAN

On the positive side, Japan’s strong historical attachment to peace still presents a problem for Japanese warmongers. 75% of Japanese people want their country to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, permanently banning them. (3) Nagasaki’s Mayor Shiro Suzuki’s refusal to invite Israel to the memorial to the victims of the atom bomb on August 9th, citing the likelihood of largescale protests against the Zionist regime’s genocide, showed the potential strength of anti-imperialist sentiment in Japan – much to the fury of the USA and Israel. But it’s on the issue of tax rises for arms spending that the government is weakest. A 2023 opinion poll showed 80% opposed to financing defence spending through tax increases. (4) The recent resignation of prime minister Kishida is partly related to this issue and shows the potential focus for peace campaigning in future.

(1) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/japans-plans-for-an-antichina-alliance/

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10175050/

(3) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2020.1834961#abstract

(4) https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/06/24/making-defence-spending-sustainable-for-japan/

 

Hiroshima destroyed by nuclear bomb

Shinzo Abe. photo by tttins