Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the Twenty-First Century

Japan’s Relative Decline and New Security Challenges in a Multipolar Asia

Japan’s regional environment has shifted more dramatically in the past decade than generally conveyed with common descriptors like China’s rise, the North Korea threat, or a power shift in Asia. These catchphrases are accurate but stress continuities over several decades—Chinese economic growth, North Korean military provocations, the economic and military growth of other East Asian states—rather than significant milestones and “game changers” since 2006. There have been many such game changers, however, and Japanese are well aware of them. Japanese media and political campaigns regularly debate issues such as the scale of China’s rise and how Japan should respond, the pros and cons of restarting nuclear power reactors to address Japan’s spike in energy imports after the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, how to most effectively address the growing nuclear, missile, and other threats posed by North Korea, and how to tackle the challenges of Japan’s population decline in recent years as part of what demographers call a superaging society. Japan’s security renaissance is driven, in part, by these debates over appropriate responses to Japan’s relative decline in Asia.

China’s economic size has nearly tripled since 2006. In 2010, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, a significant psychological milestone for citizens of both states. North Korean military provocations escalated beyond testing missiles and nuclear weapons (which also continued) to provocative military operations in this period, with the sinking of a South Korea submarine and shelling of a South Korean border island, under the direction of a new and little known third-generation dynastic leader who was only twenty-nine years old when he assumed power in 2011. South Korea, Australia, and ASEAN as a regional unit all significantly increased their regional security engagement in this period as well, indicating a move away from the China-Japan regional rivalry apparent since the 1990s toward a more complex, multiactor regional economic and security environment. In 2011, the United States announced a recommitment to the region through a multifaceted strategy to “rebalance” US diplomatic, economic, and military assets to the region. In 2012, total defense spending in the Asian region as a whole (including beyond East Asia) surpassed the next-highest region, Europe, for the first time—$287.4 billion for Asia versus $259 billion for Europe—accounting for 20 percent of total defense expenditures in the world.1 Spending on defense has continued to rise in the region since then, with Chinese increases as the principal driver of the total reported increase. According to a 2014 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Military spending in Asia and Oceania increased by 5 per cent in 2014 and by 62 per cent between 2005 and 2014, reaching $439 billion in 2014 at current prices and exchange rates. . . . In 2014 the growth of 9.7 per cent in China’s expenditure dominated the regional trend, with the overall increase in the rest of the region standing at just 1.2 per cent.”²

Japan’s evolving international environment interacts with Japan’s domestic politics and conceptions of its security identity in a dynamic fashion. It is not simply that a changing international environment directly leads to security policy change in Japan. Japan’s security renaissance is sparked by Japan’s changing interpretation of its security needs and perceived efficacy of different approaches to security in a shifting world—in particular Japan’s declining relative power in relation to China and other regional actors, the persistence and escalation of the North Korean and Chinese military threats, and a global shift toward more cooperative security practices via formal institutions, expanded “mini-lateralism,” and globalized production networks. These regional and global changes have inspired new thinking in Japan that roots Japan’s security in an expanded regional and global contribution—including through an expanded US-Japan alliance and new security partnerships with other regional actors. Changing international conditions thus interact with domestic conceptions of security identity and also alter the domestic political landscape. These domestic effects of a changed international environment are examined in chapters 4 and 5.

This chapter describes the changed regional and global security environment Japan’s leaders and citizens have perceived since 2006, and begins to discuss how Japan’s security renaissance can be seen in new Japanese security policies and practices in the region. Further examination of Japan’s changing security policies and practices of the past decade follow in chapters 4 and 5, linking more explicitly the interaction between a changing international environment and changing domestic politics at home.

In response to the perception of an increasingly insecure region, Japanese security planners have crafted a three-tiered response: (1) increase Japan’s own military capabilities, including by reforming the legal framework and strategic deployment limiting the use of these forces; (2) deepen security cooperation and planning within the existing US-Japan alliance framework, including formal revision of the US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation; and (3) seek new security partners in the region, both friendly states and multilateral institutions.³

China’s new behavior and resources mark the most dramatic change in this period but represent only one of many changes Japanese security policies have sought to address. There is a rising economic prosperity in the region overall, leading to a relative decline of Japan economically and militarily—though in both areas Japan remains a regional giant. This is a striking change from the time Japan entered into the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, when only the United States and Japan could be seen as important regional actors, with the Soviet Union about to emerge as a third.

The same sort of old and new regional security concerns discussed in chapter 2 continue to challenge Japan’s security, but several are growing more severe and perceived as more immediate, such as the possibility of unprovoked military action by North Korea against Japan and the dramatically escalated territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands that many Japanese believe could lead to a Chinese military attack. Moreover, Japan’s resource dependence spiked after the devastating tsunami of March 2011 and resulting meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant led to a shutdown of all fifty-three of Japan’s nuclear power reactors. Oil and gas imports rose sharply as a result, shifting Japan’s trade balance into a deficit for the first time since the early postwar years. The huge increase in oil and gas imports deepened Japan’s concerns over vulnerable shipping routes through the contested South China Sea and pirate-prone coastline near the Gulf of Aden and heightened awareness of Japan’s resource dependence among the general public.

The US rebalance to Asia is another shift that Japan’s security planners have sought to adapt to, largely by following a similar strategy. Japan’s rebalance in this period involves a deepening of the US-Japan alliance and expansion of security partners in the region.

Rising Regional Prosperity and the Relative Decline of Japan

Japan is no longer the standout economic giant with an anomalously diminutive military posture. Rather, it is a long-stagnating state with rising security challenges and significant future challenges facing its domestic economy and society. Meanwhile, across the region—well beyond China—states are experiencing robust economic growth, a growing middle class, and rising military spending as a result. The security environment is therefore getting more complex as more states have grown into middle-income states and completed a first phase of postindependence state formation. While China’s increased military-related activities in the region have driven Japan’s recent expansion of JSDF and JCG capabilities and roles, Japan also perceives independently a national interest in helping to shape and create linkages with the growing military infrastructure developing across Southeast Asia, Oceania, and South Asia. For example, Japan has an interest in shaping codes of conduct to avoid unintentional escalation or accidents at sea and to promote personal ties with growing officer corps of regional states through educational exchanges and joint exercises. Japan actively promotes following the rule of law in its diplomacy, which includes a stress on international law of the sea. While China and others often describe such behavior as “balancing” China, the reality is much more nuanced. Moreover, apart from the strictly military balance and security concerns in the region, Japan’s economic decline relative to other states in the region also has security implications for Japan—both directly and psychologically.

FIGURE 3.1 Japan’s GDP in comparison with its neighbors, 1989–2014. World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/1.1.

Figure 3.1 shows Japan’s GDP size relative to its neighbors since 1989 in five-year increments. In 1989, Japan’s was the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States. Its GDP of just over $3 trillion was almost twice the combined GDP of China, Russia, India, South Korea, and all ten ASEAN countries. In 2014, China’s GDP alone was over twice that of Japan’s and the remaining economies combined were about 70 percent larger than Japan’s. The Japanese economy is still well over twice the size of the Russian or Indian economies (in real terms, not using PPP) and almost twice the size of the combined ASEAN economies, and Japan’s per capita income is vastly higher than that of any of these states. However, all these economies have been growing faster than Japan’s economy and are likely to continue to do so (except, perhaps, Russia), further narrowing the economic gap between Japan and its neighbors.

The growth burst from 2004 to 2014 is especially striking—with China leading the way by far, but total ASEAN GDP also doubling in this ten-year period and South Korea’s GDP increasing by over 50 percent. By contrast, Japan’s economy in this period declined in dollar terms. In yen terms, the Japanese economy has been more or less stagnant for the past two decades—with recent modest growth offset by a decline in the value of the yen relative to the dollar (a decline that also complicates multiyear comparisons of Japanese military spending, as we will see later in this chapter). Looking over a longer, twenty-year period, from 1994 to 2014, Japan’s average annual growth rate was an anemic 1.21 percent versus China’s rate of 9.2 percent; in between this stagnation and boom, India grew at 6.2 percent, Malaysia 5.7 percent, and even more mature economies like South Korea and Taiwan managed a strong 5.4 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively.4

In part as a result of increased economic size, states across the region are also spending more on their militaries—just as Japan did when it was growing economically. In the past decade, Asia imported the largest number of weapons outside the Middle East.⁵ Still, military spending by Japan and China dwarfs other military spending in the region, even though Japan spends only 1 percent of its GDP on defense (see figure 3.2). Russia also spends mightily (above Japan in recent years), but only a small fraction of its spending is devoted to Asia. The United States remains far and away the largest military spender, with its stated rebalance policy to Asia likely to lead to even more resources devoted to the region in future years (though, as we will see later in this chapter, US military spending has been declining overall since 2010).⁶

Japanese defense documents do not express concern over growing military spending in the region apart from China and North Korea but do call for adequate training of new military forces and more broadly express concern about a potential arms race in the region that links to China’s greatly increased military spending. Japan also shares security concerns with many states in Southeast Asia and so now has new potential partners—and is planning for further partnerships as these states continue to grow.

FIGURE 3.2 Japan’s defense spending in comparison with its neighbors, 1989–2014. ASEAN-8 does not include Myanmar and Laos because of unavailability of data for some years and does not include data for Vietnam in 1999 (and thus is ASEAN-7 for that year). International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, 1988–2015, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/. Constant 2011 US$ billion.

Despite Japan’s relative economic decline, its economic size still dwarfs that of Southeast Asia—larger than the combined ASEAN GDP by about one-third, despite having less than one-quarter of the combined ASEAN population. Moreover, despite relative decline, Japan is expanding its security role in the region—both bilaterally and through multiple regional institutions. Clearly, therefore, relative decline does not directly translate into any single response in security strategy. Policy is mediated through politics, as discussed further in chapters 4 and 5. Japan’s new security roles are often underappreciated but are important. For example, Japan is hardly mentioned in Robert Kaplan’s best-selling Asia’s Cauldron—which captures the tensions surrounding the South China Sea in an otherwise engaging manner—except in reference to the legacies of World War II.

Looking forward, Japan’s relative economic decline seems inevitable owing to its challenging demographic future and complex economic challenges caused by a shrinking, aging population. Japan’s birthrate sank below replacement level in 1975—over forty years ago—and as a result its total population has begun to decline, a development that will accelerate more sharply in the next decades according to projections from the United Nations Population Division (see figure 3.3).

FIGURE 3.3 Historical and projected total population for Japan, 1950–2045. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

To date, population decline in Japan has been quite modest—about a million out of a population of around 127 million—but this decline will accelerate in the coming years, with the population expected to fall below 120 million in the 2020s and below 100 million (a psychological milestone) around 2050. This demographic reality—one essentially impossible to reverse in the short term given human life spans—makes the prospects of positive economic growth seem quite dim. Indeed, just maintaining the current size of the economy with a smaller population will require per capita economic growth—but relative to other countries in the region, especially the growing populations of some Southeast Asian nations, Japan’s economic size is almost certain to decline. By 2040, the population of the Philippines is expected to exceed that of Japan, and Vietnam will be roughly the same size at around 100 million.⁷ Indonesia, already the second-largest in population in East Asia after China, is expected to grow to a population of around 300 million. These countries are all likely to see overall growth in their GDPs as their workforces increase, just as Japan did in its high-growth period in the 1960s to 1980s, when its working-age population also grew. These demographically growing countries are also countries, coincidence or not, where Japan’s new regional security outreach has been most robust.

FIGURE 3.4 Historical and projected population of those sixty-five and greater, Japan, 1950–2045. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm.

Japan’s shrinking population is only part of the demographic challenge it faces. In addition, its remaining population is getting older (see figure 3.4). In fact, in the language of demographers, Japan is already one of just three countries in the world called a super-aged society—one where more than 20 percent of the population is over sixty-five years old. Japan was at 26 percent in 2015, followed by Italy at 22 percent and Germany at 21 percent.⁸

This difficult demographic picture has contributed to Japan’s dismal public finances. Despite an international image as a country of obsessive savers and prudent financial managers, Japan now has the highest rate of government debt in relation to GDP of any economically significant country in the world—higher than Greece, Ireland, Italy, and even all but a handful of developing countries (see table 3.1). This fiscal reality suggests significant limits on the possibilities for the future of Japan’s security renaissance.

There has been an active and at times quite divisive debate in Japan over immigration as a possible solution to Japan’s demographic challenges. While immigration could perhaps provide a partial solution, demographically speaking—quite apart from the politics—it would be practically impossible to resettle enough immigrants in Japan to offset the effects of Japan’s aging society. By one estimate, Japan would need to import over ten million immigrants per year to keep the same dependency ratio of working-aged population to elderly.9

TABLE 3.1 Japan’s government debt as a percentage of GDP, calendar years 1999–2014

Source: Ministry of Finance, http://www.mof.go.jp/budget/fiscal_condition/related_data/sy014_26_02.pdf.

Japan is not the only country in East Asia to face these challenges, however—which itself poses its own set of security implications. In the 2020s, South Korea and Taiwan will also join the ranks of the super-aged. In 2015, South Korea was the most rapidly aging society in the world.¹⁰ By contrast, Japan’s growth rate of the aged has passed its peak. By 2040, China and the United States are expected to be among the fifty-five countries that will join the ranks of the superaged.¹¹ In China, the working-age population (aged fifteen to fifty-nine) began to shrink just after China became the world’s second-largest economy in 2010. This decline is expected to substantially accelerate in the 2030s.¹² Unlike Japan, China does not yet have a fully developed social safety net for the elderly. This may prove to be an advantage by not immediately leading to the crushing fiscal realities Japan is currently facing related to its superaged society, but it may also lead to increased social instability. China also faces other demographic obstacles such as its male-female imbalance that some have connected to future security threats.¹³

In sum, Japan’s economic size relative to other regional states is almost certain to decline further, as is Japan’s overall population. This is a starkly different security environment than Japan faced at the end of World War II or at the end of the Cold War—and even at the start of the first Abe administration in 2006. And yet Japan today still enjoys substantial military capability advantages over other regional states because of many decades of investment in technology and training, extensive sharing of technology and training with the United States, and still boasting one of the largest defense budgets in the world.

The website Global Firepower ranked Japan’s overall military capability in 2015 as ninth in the world, after the United States, Russia, China, India, the United Kingdom, France, South Korea, and Germany.14 Turkey is listed as number ten. Note that these rankings do not factor in nuclear weapons; in addition, comparing military capabilities across all areas is a notoriously difficult endeavor given important subjective measures such as level of technology and training. Still, it seems beyond dispute that Japan’s military forces in terms of capabilities overall would fall behind the United States, Russia, and China and above most other states in the world apart from the short list mentioned in the Global Firepower list.¹⁵

In terms of a specific military conflict, however—such as a naval battle between Japan and China or Japan and Russia—JSDF capabilities and training could match even the larger Russian or Chinese forces in some scenarios and certainly constitute a significant deterrent. The JMSDF has increased its number of submarines and Aegis-equipped destroyers in the past decade and has plans to increase the number of combat aircraft and ISR capabilities. The JASDF possesses the fifth-largest number of planes of any air force in the world and among the very highest level of technology. In addition, of course, Japan is a formal military ally with the United States, which is treaty obligated to defend Japan if it is attacked. Thus, while Japanese power may be declining in relative terms, in absolute terms Japan’s military capabilities are stronger than ever and likely to grow further (if modestly) in response to new and emerging threats, discussed in the next section.

New Regional Security Concerns and Deepening Prior Concerns

East Asia is a geographically large, densely populated, diverse area with a range of security concerns as wide as in the world as a whole. Moreover, increasingly the international relations of East Asia are connected to the more western and southern parts of Asia to create a larger, more dynamic system. In particular for Japan, India has begun to feature prominently in security discussions and strategy. In addition, the Asia-Pacific conception of East Asia also broadens the scope of security concerns and opportunities. Japan’s new security partnership with Australia and participation in new multilateral security institutions has expanded the East Asian region from the perspective of military security. This expanded security region faces both long-standing and new security challenges.

Four of the world’s ten largest standing armies are in East Asian states (China, North Korea, South Korea, and Vietnam).16 The border between North and South Korea remains the most militarized border on the planet. The legacy of a China divided by the civil war that concluded in 1949 with the victory of the People’s Republic on the mainland and Republic of China on Taiwan also remains a dangerous conflict flash point, despite declining overt military tension in the past decade. Russia maintains the second-largest nuclear weapons force in the world after the United States, and the number of Chinese nuclear weapons has been increasing rather than decreasing. Despite the formal end of the Cold War, Russian planes and ships continue to test the boundaries of Japan’s territorial space, requiring regular scrambles by the JSDF.¹⁷ In Northeast Asia—Japan’s immediate neighborhood—the Cold War never fully ended, while new post–Cold War threats have emerged.

Familiar Cold War–era conflict flash points have taken on new dimensions in the post–Cold War era and in the past decade. In North Korea, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has ratcheted up tensions with close neighbors even further, alienating even its longtime patron, China. North Korean actions have been a principal driver of Japan’s evolving security policies since the mid-1990s and continue to feature prominently in Japan’s defense strategy documents as a primary rationale for strengthening Japan’s military capabilities and for adapting longstanding institutions and practices. Japan’s concern over Chinese military capabilities has also substantially evolved from the Cold War era even as the long-standing concerns over China’s nuclear and conventional missile capabilities remain. In the period of focus of this book, China’s growing military capabilities and actions have become the primary military threat identified by Japanese security planners—and therefore further discussion of the new “China threat” to Japan is the subject of its own section just following.

As Robert Kaplan has observed, “Europe is a landscape; East Asia is a seascape.”18 Maritime security has long been a primary concern of Japan’s defense planners, which necessarily involves the Asian region—the transit area for the vast majority of Japan’s imports and exports. In recent years Japanese defense planners have framed many of Japan’s security concerns around the idea of “threats to the global commons”—which includes freedom of navigation on the high seas and through shared straits but also shared airspace, outer space, and cyberspace. Japan’s dependence on the sea for its security and prosperity is among its oldest security concerns, but as technology changes and new actors have emerged in the international system, the specific nature of Japan’s concerns regarding the maritime commons has evolved. During the Cold War, Japan expanded its contributions to the US-Japan alliance to include patrols of up to one thousand nautical miles of sea lanes from Japan to protect against the Soviet threat. In the 1990s, Japan made headlines by contributing to regional antipiracy operations around the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia, working with Singapore and Indonesian partners in particular. A decade later, Japan again made headlines by contributing to anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of the Horn of Africa. In this latest stage, under Japan’s security renaissance, Japan has begun to work with countries in Southeast Asia to bolster their coastal defenses in response to China’s aggressive maritime claims, which Japan sees as potentially compromising the free passage of goods and oil bound for Japan through this shared maritime space.

Geography creates an especially important role for the JMSDF, one of world’s largest and most capable navies. The JMSDF is well prepared to play an enhanced role in protecting the maritime commons as the service less discredited after World War II,¹⁹ and one with a long history of international cooperation with the US Navy throughout the Cold War and post–Cold War years. More recently, the JCG also has expended greater energy and resources both in Japan’s territorial defense and in providing assistance in protecting the maritime commons in Southeast Asia—to the degree that it has been described as a “fourth branch” of Japan’s postwar military forces.²⁰

China factors closely into these security concerns—as both a potential contributor and potential spoiler. As a potential contributor, China’s expanded blue water navy and other maritime forces contribute—as Japan does—to anti-piracy operations in Southeast Asia and around the Gulf of Aden. In the medium term, China’s expanded blue water capabilities could contribute to the sea lane protection in East Asia currently provided largely by the United States with assistance from Japan. China figures as a spoiler, however, in the rivalry between it and Japan—and with the United States—and in its consequential competition for influence in multilateral security institutions. Moreover, China frequently sacrifices low-level security cooperation to express displeasure over other concerns, such as Japanese prime minister visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese textbook descriptions of historical events, or US arms sales to Taiwan.

China’s Leading Role in Japan’s Security Renaissance

China’s resurgence in the region is the biggest change to Japan’s security environment in the past decade and poses the largest long-term challenge to Japanese security—and, arguably, to global security. China has risen to a level of “existential threat” in the eyes of some Japanese—paralleling language used to describe the Soviet threat to the United States in the context of the Cold War. Chinese military forces have possessed the ability to strike Japan with both conventional and nuclear weapons for half a century. In terms of defense planning, it is Japan’s alliance with the United States that protects Japan from this threat through the doctrine of extended deterrence. China possessed approximately 175 immediately usable nuclear warheads plus another 65 in reserve in 2010—and is expected to greatly expand that number in the next decade.21 Moreover, China is seeking greater resilience of its nuclear weapons in the event of an attack by building mobile underground facilities to prevent a successful first strike. Although China has a formal pledge not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states like Japan, escalating military tensions between Japan and China naturally lead Japanese defense planners to question this pledge.

It is ironic that Japanese security concerns over China have played such an outsized role in Japan’s security renaissance since China has repeatedly criticized Japan’s increased defense capabilities, international security contributions, and deepened military alliance with the United States—which, arguably, China itself has brought to fruition. In this way, Japan-China security relations exhibit a classic security dilemma.

Japan’s relationship with China is multifaceted, however, with deep economic and social ties despite growing military tensions.22 Tourism between the two countries is booming: more than 3.5 million Japanese visited China in 2013, up 70 percent from 2000 to 2010; more than 1 million Chinese have visited Japan, and many more are expected after visa restrictions were relaxed in 2011.²³ According to another study, the number of Chinese tourists to Japan is predicted to increase from 1.4 million in 2010 to 3.9 million in 2020.²⁴ Japan has even become a popular location for Chinese elite to buy second homes.²⁵ The countries are deeply connected economically, with much of Japan’s modest economic growth in the past decade attributed to Japanese trade with and investments in China and Chinese economic growth undergirded by Japan’s substantial foreign direct investment (FDI) in China (which has declined in percentage terms in recent years but remains the largest source of FDI apart from Hong Kong and Taiwan).²⁶

Japan enjoyed largely peaceful relations with China for roughly two thousand years, until the end of the nineteenth century, and Japan’s religious, literary, and broader cultural traditions have been pervasively shaped by the interactions between the two states.²⁷ On one of many visits of Chinese leaders to Japan, Premier Wen Jiabao remarked in a speech in the Diet in 2007, “The length, scale and influence of China-Japan friendly exchanges are rarely seen in the course of world civilization. These exchanges are our shared historical and cultural heritage which we should hold in great value, enrich and pass on from generation to generation.”²⁸

The period from the start of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895 (which resulted in the Japanese colonization of the island of Taiwan) to the conclusion of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1945 created a vivid and difficult fifty years of troubled memories, however. Still, after Japan’s reopening to China was possible as a result of US normalization with China in the second phase of the Cold War, Japan quickly reestablished positive relations with its close neighbor and provided massive economic development assistance to China (in lieu of reparations for the damage it cased in World War II) in the subsequent three decades. As Sheila Smith writes in her fascinating study of China’s impact on Japanese domestic politics, “The last forty years of Japanese-Chinese diplomatic relations have rested on a simple premise: economic interdependence would be the path to postwar reconciliation between the peoples of both countries.”29

Unfortunately, however, this premise turns out to have been flawed. As economic interdependence deepened, China became more demanding about historical reconciliation issues, and its overt military challenges to Japan also increased. As Denny Roy has framed in his study of China’s contemporary rise, “China is not only a rising great power, it is a returning great power.”³⁰ This fact has great import to Japan’s relations with China given the difficult past between the two states in the long twentieth century. In international politics, the powerful write history, or rewrite it.

Japan experienced the most tense relations with China since the end of World War II from 2010 to 2016, but periods of tension are certainly not new between the two states. Moreover, the period of focus in this book, 2006 to 2016, began with quite positive relations: it is not the case that Japan-China relations have been on a continuous downward spiral. It is often forgotten in examinations of Prime Minister Abe’s recent tenure as prime minister that when he first came to power in 2006, his rise was overtly welcomed by China as a potential for a reset in relations after the difficult Koizumi years, particularly since Abe publicly pledged not to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine as prime minister—the practice restarted under Koizumi that contributed to a deep chill in Japan-China relations under Koizumi’s tenure.

Prime Minister Abe made his first foreign visit as prime minister to China to signal the importance he attached to that bilateral relationship, and on this October 2006 visit he signed a joint communiqué, titled “Sino-Japan Relations of Top Priority,” that promised a cooperative solution to the East China Sea boundary and resource issue, joint research in history, and a range of new exchanges and areas of cooperation.³¹ Premier Wen Jiabao visited Japan in April 2007, the first by a senior Chinese leader since 2000. During the visit, Wen acknowledged Japanese apologies for past wartime conduct and expressed appreciation for Japanese economic assistance over the years.³² That same year, China became Japan’s largest trading partner.³³ In May of the following year, President Hu Jintao visited Japan to sign the “China-Japan Joint Statement on All-round Promotion of Strategic Relationship of Mutual Benefit.”34 The following month, Japan and China signed an agreement for cooperative development of the Chunxiao gas field in the East China Sea. Prime Minister Jun’ichirō Koizumi and US president George W. Bush were famously photographed throwing a baseball during Koizumi’s visit to the United States in June 2001; Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda (Abe’s first-term successor) and Chinese premier Wen re-created this image in December 2007 in Beijing. This iconography illustrated that Japan and China were indeed “playing ball” after the difficulties of the Koizumi years. By August 2010, on the eve of an annual Japan-China friendship meeting, the China Daily published a front-page article hailing the best relations between the two countries ever. And then things began to fall apart. . . .

The Territorial Dispute Over the Senkaku Islands

Just days after the Japan-China friendship meeting lauded in China’s state-run media, a small Chinese fishing trawler operating in the East China Sea entered waters that Japan considers part of its EEZ and was directed by the JCG to leave. The ship did not comply, collided with the JCG vessel, and the crew of the ship was arrested and taken to nearby Japanese territory to be prosecuted for damaging a JCG vessel.³⁵ Chinese officials were enraged at the “abduction” of Chinese citizens in this manner, issuing harshly worded diplomatic protests and responding with a series of actions that greatly escalated the dispute during the ensuing month. The initial arrests and the Chinese response altered the status quo beyond return, even after the crew was allowed to return to China the following month. Nationalist agitators in both countries (in addition to others in Taiwan, which also claims the islands) as well as ordinary citizens pressed their governments to better protect the sovereignty of their national territory, leading to a series of intensified interactions between the JCG and a range of public and private Chinese ships and aircraft in the years that followed, and that continue to this day.

The territory in question is what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands, or, technically, islets: five small uninhabited islands and three large protruding rocks, with a total area of about four square miles, located to the southwest of the Japanese main islands and the outlying Ryūkyū island chain. These islets are roughly equidistant from populated Japanese islands and Taiwan and also close to mainland China; they are roughly one thousand miles from Tokyo. As a practical matter, as in the so-called Fishing Trawler Incident of 2010, the maritime space around these islands is central to the dispute—waters rich in fishing resources and possibly undersea minerals, oil, and gas.

This territory has been “administered” by Japan (a term important to the US-Japan Security Treaty) since 1895, apart from the period of US occupation of Japan and administration of the Okinawan islands (1945–1972). One of the islands was used as a firing range for US forces in the early postwar period. In the early twentieth century, a small Japanese fishing village was located on one of the islands, which remained in private hands until it and two other of the islands were purchased by the Japanese government (aka, “nationalized”) in 2012 to keep them out of the hands of Japanese nationalists seeking to escalate the dispute, a second major spark of escalation in the evolving crisis in Japan-China relations. China (and Taiwan) maintain that these islands are administratively part of Taiwan and thus should have been returned to Chinese control at the end of World War II when Japan agreed to relinquish all territory it acquired in its long campaign of territorial expansion dating back to the first Sino-Japan War, which included the Japanese withdrawal from the island of Taiwan. Japan’s position is that the islands were integrated into Japanese territory unrelated to its first war with China, following international law of the time.36 The United States does not take a position in this sovereignty dispute but has repeatedly stated that the US-Japan Security Treaty is crystal clear that any territory administered by Japan is included in the US security guarantee provided to Japan under Article Five of the treaty. This position was even publicly restated by President Obama himself during a visit to Tokyo in April 2014.

The most substantial and urgent threat perceived by Japan in connection with China’s reemergence and military rise remains over China’s claims to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands. China’s increasingly assertive claims to this territory and actions to challenge Japan’s administrative control over them constitutes the principal driver of Japan’s increased military capabilities and reform of long-standing practices and institutions that have limited Japan’s effective use of its military power. For example, significant shifts in JSDF posture from the north to southwest of Japan, development of “jointness” between the three services of the JSDF, and development of amphibious assault capabilities set out in the 2010 NDPG and expanded in the 2014 NDPG are all directly the result of the increased perception of threat from China.

China Challenges Beyond the Senkaku Islands

The nature of the Chinese military threat to Japan has changed dramatically as China’s economic rise has fueled huge increases in China’s military spending, capabilities, and activities. In the area of military security, China poses both a direct territorial challenge with rising military and quasi-military escalation and a broader challenge related to its growing capabilities and the implications for the security of the Japanese main islands, of joint US-Japan forces in Okinawa, and the security of the sea lanes through the South China Sea, which both Japan and China rely on as a lifeline for energy imports and trade. China surpassed Japanese defense spending in 2004.37 Moreover, China’s defense spending is dramatically higher if adjusted for PPP—$400 billion in 2011, over four times the real dollar value.³⁸ Japan’s annual defense white papers and the annual China Security Reports produced by the MOD’s National Institute for Defense Studies convey growing explicit concern about China, in contrast to the vague expressions of concern conveyed in defense white papers prior to 2006.

The increased Japanese concern about a China threat is based on increasingly provocative Chinese military and quasi-military actions, which are widely covered in the Japanese media and documented annually in Japan’s defense white papers. For example, the transit of Chinese naval vessels through the Tsugaru Strait (between the main Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido to the north) and the Miyako Strait (between Okinawa and Miyako Island chain to the south) took place over a dozen times from 2006 to 2014. In April 2010 Chinese military helicopters buzzed Japanese destroyers that were tracking ten Chinese naval vessels en route to the Pacific via the Miyako Strait, leading to a formal diplomatic protest by the Japanese government. In January 2013 Chinese naval vessels locked fire-control radar on JMSDF vessels in the East China Sea on two separate occasions, again leading to diplomatic protests by the Japanese government. (Chinese officials deny that these latter incidents took place at all.)

Bjørn Grønning has described Japan engaging in “counterbalancing” behavior to China’s reemergence, rooting this both in “Japanese perceptions of aggressive Chinese behavior” and in the changing balance of military power in the region in China’s favor. He writes, “Japan’s balancing has manifested itself both internally through a comprehensive revision of the JSDF’s force posture and military capabilities and externally through efforts to strengthen the Japan-US alliance framework.”39 Jeffrey Hornung, too, has argued that Japan “has shifted away from its traditional engagement policy toward first a soft hedge, followed by a harder hedge that continues to this day.”⁴⁰

China’s own defense planning documents—which are widely criticized as lacking sufficient transparency—acknowledge China’s quest for a blue water navy, transitioning away from coastal defense to “far sea defense.” Chinese defense planners also frequently refer to a strategy of “asymmetrical warfare” to challenge the United States, including plans to develop “carrier killer” ballistic missiles and EMP attack capability.⁴¹ In January 2007, China destroyed one of its own weather satellites—an act that demonstrated to itself and the world its ability to destroy the type of satellites that US forces rely on for weapons and troop guidance. Such Chinese statements and actions underscore a dilemma Japan faces in its attempts to respond to China’s increase in military capabilities: while Japan is seeking to respond to China’s new muscle, China is seeking to develop forces capable of deterring the much more powerful US military. In this sense, Japan is caught in the middle—though, of course, it benefits from its security relationship with the United States.

Beyond these hard military challenges, China also poses a broader threat to Japan’s global economic competitiveness, its regional economic leadership, and its soft power—particularly since Shinzō Abe’s return to power, when China began a coordinated global propaganda campaign to paint Abe as a dangerous ultranationalist and Japan as the provocative and unpredictable military power in the region. The milestone of China surpassing Japan as the second-largest economy in the world in 2010 led to countless media stories in Japan about the rising China challenge, which were only in part about China’s growing military challenge; recall that that year began as one of celebration of several years of improving Japan-China relations, including new rhetoric from the recently elected DPJ leadership about a new era of closeness in Japan’s relations with the region, including China (policies discussed further in chapter 4).

Japan’s complicated relationship with China is not merely a bilateral phenomenon, though. It is closely linked to other relationships. Both Japan and China view their relationship with each other through a prism that includes the United States. Japan fears the emergence of a “G2” relationship between the United States and China that excludes Japan, possibly even jeopardizing the US-Japan alliance—despite abundant US official reassurance that the G2 concept exists only in the imagination of certain thinkers outside government. China sees Japan’s power greatly amplified by the US-Japan alliance and has increasingly sought to disrupt the harmony of the alliance to weaken both US and Japanese power in the region.

Japan-China relations are also manifested through a competition over influence in Southeast Asia and Oceania—in terms of soft power but also direct economic ties and increasingly over military ties, with Japan now in a deep security partnership with Australia and with growing military ties to the Philippines and Singapore, and to Vietnam and Indonesia. Most of the states in the region traded substantially more with Japan than with China at the start of the twenty-first century but now are larger trade partners with China. In sum, as Glosserman and Snyder have provocatively captured the contemporary zeitgeist, “China is everything Japan is not: large, dynamic, confident, possessed of a nuclear arsenal, with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and prepared—if not anxious—to play a leading role in the region and the world.”⁴²

And yet China’s high level of defense spending vis-à-vis Japan does not translate directly into military superiority vis-à-vis Japan—at least not presently. Even though China’s military spending is now more than double Japan’s (and perhaps many orders of magnitude more in real terms), China still needs to make up for decades of minimal investment in defense—both in terms of the accumulated stock of weapons over time and technology and practice with the new technology.43 In addition, as a continental power and a nuclear weapons state, it has vastly greater demands on its budget compared with Japan. China has land borders with fourteen countries plus sea borders with several others. In addition, China has no formal military allies—and not even any significant informal allies; even Russia privately considers China a military threat, despite cooperating with China on multiple fronts, and North Korea is arguably more of a drain on China’s security writ large than contributor (apart from the land buffer it provides from US forces in South Korea). Thus, there are reasons to consider the military balance between Japan and China to be closer than as some pessimists portray it and also numerous reasons to expect moderation in China’s military posture in the coming years.⁴⁴ Two factors that remain especially salient to the argument of this book are addressed in the following sections of this chapter and in the following chapters; they are (1) that regardless of an objective analysis of China’s threat to Japan, Japanese themselves perceive a rising threat and are taking numerous actions to address it; and (2) that the United States plays a complex role in moderating or exacerbating Japan’s already complex relationship with China.

The relationship between the contours of the international system and the impulses in domestic politics is not unidirectional. The starting point of much international relations theory rooted in realist scholarship posits that changes at the international system level create strong pressures on domestic leaders to adapt policy. The scale of change in Japan’s region in the past decade certainly has created many such pressures to act—though even at this level ample scholarship exists in both the realist tradition and the newer constructivist tradition demonstrating that such change must be perceived by domestic actors as a cause for concern.⁴⁵ In the case of China, Japanese at many levels perceive a China threat and seek to better prepare Japan against it.⁴⁶ At the same time, decisions at the domestic level can affect the nature of the system—as we see with China’s decisions to greatly increase its military spending and to press more assertively its territorial claim over the Senkaku Islands. Japan’s security renaissance of the past decade has also greatly altered regional security dynamics.

Rebalancing to Asia: The United States and Japan in Partnership and on Their Own

Japan’s security renaissance is driven by more than China. East Asia’s economic rise has created a multipolar environment well beyond even a US-Japan-China strategic triangle. Japan’s response to this increased complexity together with its relative decline is quite similar to that of its primary alliance partner, the United States: deepen the US-Japan alliance to handle a broader range of issues and seek out new security partnerships. Like Japan, however, the United States is also losing power relatively in Asia as its investments flatten and China rises.

US defense spending dwarfs that of others in the region, including China.47 Yet as seen in figure 3.5 and as summarized by SIPRI, “Since reaching its highest recorded peak in 2010, US military expenditure has decreased by 19.8 per cent in real terms [by 2014]. The USA’s share of world military expenditure remains high at 34 per cent, but it is declining steadily year on year as the USA reduces its spending and other states increase expenditure.”48

FIGURE 3.5 US defense spending in comparison with East Asian states, 1989–2014. ASEAN-8 does not include Myanmar and Laos because of unavailability of data for some years and does not include data for Vietnam in 1999 (and thus is ASEAN-7 for that year). International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, 1988–2014, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/. Constant 2011 US$ billion.

FIGURE 3.6 Japan, US, China GDP, 1989–2014. World Bank, World Development Indicators, http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/1.1.

Economically speaking, the relative decline of the United States and Japan together is even more striking than a comparison of military spending alone. As shown in figure 3.6, in 1989 Japan and the United States were the two largest economies in the world, with Japan’s GDP amounting to 55 percent of US GDP. In 2014, Japan was number three in the world with a GDP totaling only 26 percent of the US GDP, less than half the percentage share of the US economy only twenty-five years later. Moreover, the Japanese economy was roughly eight times the size of the Chinese economy in 1989 but less than half the size in 2014; in 2014, the size of the Chinese economy was about 60 percent of the US economy, more than Japan’s share in 1989.

The US Rebalance to Asia

The US-Japan alliance is not the only part of US Asia policy, of course—though it is arguably the most important pillar. Rather, simultaneous with Japan’s security renaissance, the United States also sought to deepen its engagement with Asia through what would come to be called the rebalance strategy of the Obama administration. It is not the case, of course, that the United States was uninvolved in East Asia before the rebalance strategy. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 2, the US-Japan relationship in the Bush-Koizumi years of 2001 to 2006 was a time of great closeness and deepening of the US-Japan alliance. In addition, in a line widely thought to refer obliquely to China’s growing power in the region, the final Quadrennial Defense Review of the Bush administration in 2006 stated, “[The United States] will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States or other friendly countries.”⁴⁹ Rather, the perception of the United States by the end of the Bush years in 2008 was that the United States had become distracted by a large number of other international challenges: nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, weathering and devising strategies to address the worst international economic recession in almost a century (referred to as the Lehman shocks in Japan, as an indicator of where the root of the problem was seen), and growing discord at home about the best ways to meet the foreign policy challenges of the twenty-first century. Moreover, there was a widespread perception across Asia, including in Japan, that the Bush years reflected a unilateralism to US actions that did not make the United States a true part of the region. In addition, the United States was no longer the largest trading partner with most states in the region and had not been so for at least a decade in most cases.

President Obama looked to the Pacific from the start of his presidency (2009–2016)—even before, as he was born in Hawaii. Obama dispatched his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to make her first overseas trip to Japan and other places in Asia in February 2009, less than a month after he assumed office. She returned to Asia in July of that year for the ARF, and again in November for the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) ministerial meetings. President Obama also visited Japan in his first year in office, in November 2009, and also attended the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting that month. He met newly installed prime minister Yukio Hatoyama in New York City at the opening of the UN General Assembly in September 2009, just weeks after Hatoyama had become prime minister. Another of Obama’s early goals, “a world without nuclear weapons,” was a point of bonding between the Japanese left and Obama and a later source of disappointment as he moved away from a focus on that goal.

Beyond the Japanese aspect of the US rebalance, the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue met for the first time in July 2009, in Washington, DC, and has continued annually ever since. At the June 2013 “Sunnylands Summit” President Obama met the newly installed Chinese president Xi Jinping. At a June 2009 summit between Obama and South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, a US–South Korea “Joint Vision for the Alliance” was released—using similar language (“joint vision”) to the US-Japan joint statement released in April 2015. US-ASEAN outreach also boomed in the Obama years, with the United States signing the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with ASEAN in July 2009, serving as an important symbol appreciated by regional leaders. Later US outreach to Myanmar and deepening relations with Vietnam also indicate the depth of renewed US interest in the region—even before the escalation of the South China Sea territorial disputes drew the United States even closer to Vietnam and to the Philippines.

Across these cases, the United States and Japan shared many common interests and coordinated together in ways that further shaped Japan’s security renaissance. Japan alone cannot keep pace with China’s increased military capabilities but can address them in tandem with the United States and other partners—a core aspect of Japan’s 2013 national security strategy. Similarly, US strategy to manage China’s rise includes working more closely with existing US allies and forging new partnerships. Thus, there is much overlap and potential for cooperation in recent US and Japanese security strategies.

To realize these important synergies, however, there is a need for changes in the US-Japan alliance as a result of a rising China. In the past, as Sheila Smith has noted, “the alliance spent very little time on the possibility that Japan might become engaged in a direct conflict with China.”50 Rather, alliance planning was concerned with Japanese support of US forces over a Taiwan or a Korea contingency. At the same time as the United States seeks to recraft its alliance with Japan to respond to the new security environment—as seen in the April 2015 US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation—the United States is also seeking to craft a new relationship with China to jointly address regional and global security challenges. Also as Smith has observed, “the biggest challenge for US policymakers will be developing a cooperative relationship with Beijing while not undermining the United States’ close alliance with Tokyo.”51

This interconnectedness between Japan’s Asia outreach and US efforts to outreach to Asia has been discussed by T. J. Pempel in a broader regional context. Pempel has concluded that if the United States continues its recent policies of deeper engagement with Asia, it will help Japan avoid having to decide on a preference in its overall foreign policy, the Asian region or the US-Japan relationship.⁵² As I argue in chapter 4, the DPJ’s perceived need to make this choice—at least under the first DPJ prime minister, Hatoyama—greatly complicated its policy making.

Japan’s New Regional Security Partnerships

One challenge of the Japanese strategy of broader engagement in the region, and a similar challenge to what the United States faces, is to expand these partnerships without causing increased tensions with China over China’s fear that it is being “contained” by hostile states. Yet recent escalation of tensions in the South China Sea further concerns Japan about potential lapses in the sea lines of communication through that area and thus further encourages partnerships with regional states that seek to push back against Chinese claims, in particular the Philippines and Vietnam.

Another manifestation of Japan’s security renaissance is that Japan has added a military dimension to its bilateral relationships with a number of states in the region—not just provision of assistance or participation in joint exercises that have a security dimension (such as support for coast guards or anti-piracy operations) but also direct cooperation with the militaries of states other than the United States. Such security cooperation has proceeded furthest with Australia, where Japan issued, in 2008, its first-ever “Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation” with a state other than the United States and, in 2010, its first-ever ACSA with a state other than the United States. After Japan further relaxed arms export restrictions in 2014, Australia was at the top of a short list of states that would likely enter an agreement for the export of Japanese military equipment, such as Japan’s advanced diesel submarines that are especially useful in areas around the shallow South China Sea (though the submarine deal itself did not come to fruition).

India has also emerged as a new security partner for Japan, though not as closely as with Australia. The JMSDF joined US-India naval exercises off the coast of Okinawa beginning in 2007 and multilateral exercises that also included Australia and Singapore later that year, and in 2012 it conducted its first-ever joint naval exercises with India and has continued them annually since that time. Moreover, as with Australia, India stands to benefit from Japan’s relaxation of its arms export restrictions. The case of India is perhaps the best example of what Corey Wallace has described as Japan’s embrace of “the full spectrum of security tools in order to achieve its longer term foreign policy goals by assisting future candidate middle and great powers in sustainable political and economic development.”53 In addition to regular visits between the prime ministers of both states and talk of deepened security cooperation, the two states signed an information-sharing agreement to protect the exchange of classified military information and created a framework for the transfer of defense equipment and technology in December 2015. Looking farther into the twenty-first century, as India becomes the most populous country in the world and assuming that its economy continues to grow steadily, India may become the naval power in the region of most importance to Japanese security. India may also become the next economy to surpass Japan’s, possibly within the next decade—and already has in terms of PPP.

Japan’s earlier forays into security cooperation beyond the United States included promotion of the ARF as a way to handle traditional security issues multilaterally and provision of ODA for the training of regional coast guards (though not, pointedly, naval forces).⁵⁴ In 2012, however, the MOD announced that it would, for the first time, provide noncombat military equipment and supplies to the militaries of other countries in Asia, including the Philippines and Vietnam, for the purpose of capacity building. Japan has held bilateral talks with defense officials of numerous states in the region on an expanded and more substantive basis in this period.⁵⁵ The new JSDF chief of the Joint Staff Office even chose to visit the Philippines in the midst of the standoff between the Philippines and China over the disputed islands in the South China Sea. Wallace writes, “While Chinese boats were still surrounding the Scarborough Shoal in July, the Philippines and Japan signed a ‘Statement of Intent on Defense Cooperation and Exchanges’ which indicated that the two sides would continue to hold high level exchanges at all levels of the defense establishment—ministerial, official, and uniformed—and that the two sides would also conduct ‘training activities and exercises on the occasion of the mutual ship visits between the PN and the JMSDF.’”56 Japan also provided patrol boats and an advanced maritime surveillance system to Indonesia from 2006 to 2009 and agreed to hold high-level annual defense dialogues beginning in 2012. It has provided greater defense-related assistance to Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar as well. In addition to this new military connection with multiple states in the region, Japan continues to engage in strengthening its economic and cultural ties with the region, in no small part in recent years as a further mechanism to balance rising Chinese influence.⁵⁷

Growth in multilateral approaches to security in East Asia in the twenty-first century also enhances Japan’s growing security contributions to the region and complements long-standing Japanese approaches to East Asia in other issue areas. In the past decade, annual meetings of the ARF, ADMM+, the EAS, and Shangri-la Dialogue have become important facets of the regional security environment and ones that Japan has deepened its participation in to ensure that its interests are represented.

Japan’s security environment changed between 2006 and 2016 in ways that a wide and diverse range of Japanese saw as requiring a shift in existing policies and practices. Several long-standing concerns have deepened and new concerns have arisen. Moreover, looking forward the likelihood is that current concerns will deepen. The future security environment, of course, is unknowable—but defense planners must prepare for the most likely contingencies and also have backup plans for managing less likely game changers. In its comprehensive “strategic net assessment,” a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study argues that a full-scale military conflict between Japan and China is unlikely but that China’s “coercive power” is likely to grow in ways that will negatively affect Japan.⁵⁸ Overall, though, despite rising tensions in some areas, the broader story of developments in East Asia in the past decades is one of overwhelming growth in cooperation, including institutional networks of cooperation that have undergirded, indeed fostered, the substantial economic growth the region has enjoyed in recent decades.59

Chapter 4 examines how the shifting international environment is filtered through Japan’s recent democratic politics, including examination of the effect of turnover of power to the DPJ and back to the LDP, and further considers changes to Japan’s security policies and practices as a result of international factors discussed in this chapter and in light of the domestic political environment that characterizes Japan’s security renaissance.