Conclusion

Implications and Next Steps in Japan’s Security Renaissance

Just as the influence of the European Renaissance of the distant past extended far beyond its birthplace, Japan’s security renaissance also has reached far beyond Tokyo to include Japan’s neighbors and its longtime alliance partner, the United States. These effects of Japan’s more practical discussion of its security needs and the need for new institutions and practices to manage them have already been widely seen: JSDF capabilities have grown, procedures streamlined, and roles and missions expanded to include a number of activities beyond Japanese territory; ruling coalitions led by the DPJ and the LDP alike have supported these developments and contributed to their developments—often leading to rising tensions with Japan’s close neighbors; JSDF officers now routinely participate in high-level government planning meetings in Tokyo and liaise with counterparts around the world. Even further influences are certain to emerge in the near term as new security legislation is implemented and after national elections in July 2016, but in what manner is not yet clear.

Still, many constraints on the JSDF and on Japan’s political leadership to utilize Japan’s military power remain firmly in place, and public opposition to some aspects of Japan’s security renaissance continues. Also like the European Renaissance, the past continues to deeply inform Japan’s security future—and to limit Japan’s strategic options. Nostalgia for the past—both for the patriotism and willingness to sacrifice for the nation ascribed to Japan’s imperial era by some and for the purported pacifism of Japan’s economic boom years recalled by many—coexists with and also challenges new thinking about security that seeks to transcend old taboos. Steps toward a new security approach, as well as the many continued constraints, have important ramifications for Japan, the United States, and the region.

For the United States, Japan is likely to be an even more valuable partner to counterbalance China’s military rise but could also draw the United States into a military conflict with China: fears of entrapment are now a two-way street between the United States and Japan. Japan’s increasing security-related activity around the South China Sea could provide another voice for stability or contribute further to escalating military tensions and spending in the region. The prime minister’s new authority to dispatch the JSDF to participate in CSD operations outside Japan could lead to a new round of global security contributions by Japan in either peacetime or during one of many possible military crises that are feared in Japan’s close neighborhood, or the prime minister’s decision not to exercise this power could cause a major rift in the US-Japan alliance or with Japan’s other new security partners.

The mythology of “pacifist Japan”—or the related variant, “buck-passing Japan”—remains deeply engrained in many quarters around the world. However, the implications of Japan’s security renaissance should not be underestimated: Japan is playing a greater role in the US-Japan alliance and assisting new security partners outside Japan in important ways not widely understood outside elite circles. Japan still boasts the world’s third-largest economy—giving it economic power to back new military roles despite its relative economic decline and the accumulation of staggering public debt. And, as detailed in this book, Japan’s military forces are among the most capable in the world, are training for a range of new combat-related missions, and are increasingly led by political leadership that has expressed an interest in using these forces not only for the core defense of Japan but also for broader “international contributions” to regional and global peace and security. Japan’s domestic political debates about its military capabilities and roles beyond Japan continue to arouse heated emotions, however. Japan’s future security contributions—in either peacetime or during a military crisis regionally or globally—are far from certain.

Implications of Japan’s Security Renaissance

Japan’s security renaissance has important implications for the United States, the Asian region, and global security—and for Japan itself. Japan’s present and future security contributions—its “proactive contributions to peace”—stand poised to transform the way both Japanese themselves and the world around them view Japan’s military forces and Japan’s contributions to global peace and prosperity.

Implications for Japan

Four implications of Japan’s security renaissance for Japan itself deserve special attention.

First, Japan is now better prepared to handle possible security contingencies. Moreover, its improved capabilities and practices for managing these assets improve its deterrence posture, ideally preventing a security contingency from occurring in the first place. Japan is more secure due to the efforts of Japan’s political leadership across parties and dedicated security-related bureaucrats and JSDF personnel.

Second, despite cross-party support and leadership to improve Japan’s military roles and capabilities in recent years, organized opposition to many of the new security practices implemented by the Abe government in 2013 to 2016 shows continued disagreement about important choices in Japan’s security future. Japan’s security renaissance does not represent a break from the past but rather a new framing of the present in relation to the past. The entire postwar period of Japanese politics has been characterized by protracted, deep disagreements among important political actors regarding the appropriate military security posture for Japan. These disagreements have not been erased in the past decade and will continue to shape Japan’s security future—and Japan’s domestic politics as well.

Third, seventy years after the conclusion of World War II, Japan must still make progress toward addressing the first historical legacy of Japan’s past: its colonial-era and wartime conduct and policies. The Abe government’s 2015 Advisory Panel on History report makes positive and useful suggestions for some next steps that the Japanese government should pursue to better address the legacies of this period,1 including introducing a course on contemporary Japanese history (which, astonishingly, does not yet exist) into the national high school curriculum and support of further expert-level study of the history of the twentieth century in Asia from a cross-national perspective—but political leaders must play a leading role in reshaping the discourse on Japan’s past beyond well-vetted anniversary statements. If Prime Minister Abe and his successors truly wish to create a Japan where future generations are not “predestined to apologize”—as Abe called for in his cabinet statement marking the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II—they must more fully convey in this generation an appreciation for the harm that Japan caused in that period of its history and the active responsibility Japanese at the time had in causing that harm. This is not only a moral responsibility. In terms of implications for Japan’s contemporary security renaissance, these history issues limit Japan’s strategic choices (such as working more closely with South Korea) and make other actions more politically or diplomatically costly than they need be. That said, Japanese leaders need willing counterparts in neighboring states to make true progress on reconciliation, partners shown to be in short supply of late.

Fourth, Japan’s relationship with the United States has deepened, reinforcing an important counterweight to China’s rise in the region and ensuring Japan’s access to some of the most advanced technology and practices for enhancing its security—such as improved missile defense, the most comprehensive surveillance satellite network in the world, and important tools to prepare for new security domains of cyberspace and outer space. This strengthening of the US-Japan military relationship has an important implication for Japan, though it is not without continued problems—from broad concerns about both entrapment and abandonment to practical ones over the sustainability of the concentrated military presence in Okinawa. Some of these issues are discussed in the section on Japan’s security future later in this chapter.

Implications for the United States

Japan’s security renaissance of the past decade and deepening of its security relationship with the United States in years prior have made Japan a more reliable security partner and contributed to a more stable and peaceful East Asia. The government-to-government relationship between the United States and Japan is improved by Japan’s growing engagement with security concerns and challenges the United States perceives in the region and globally; the relationship between the two governments is the strongest it has ever been, despite disagreements across a range of policy issues from nuclear weapons to currency intervention and other areas where agreement is present but implementation is lacking. Japan’s new security posture and attitudes have also posed some drawbacks for the United States, however, and there are still numerous areas where the long-standing US view that Japan is not doing enough in terms of a security contribution remains.

In contrast to the many years that the US-Japan security relationship could be described as one where Japan has feared to varying degrees entrapment in US conflicts, this is one area where the alliance has truly become more equal in recent years—with the United States now concerned about entrapment in several areas as well. The possibility of being pulled into a war with China over “uninhabited rocks” between Japan and China is one concern that is new to the US-Japan relationship and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This is not to imply that Japan’s actions precipitated this possibility but rather that increased combat readiness and new deployment patterns of the JSDF to manage such a contingency—such as the shift of forces to the southwest in Japan and more seamless coordination among the branches of the JSDF—make this worst-case scenario more imaginable than it had been at earlier stages of Japan’s military readiness. The United States has sought to address this concern through private discussions with Japanese leaders to mitigate unnecessary military escalation. The United States has also sought to bolster deterrence of military action by China through more frequent rhetorical support for the US commitment to defend all territory administered by Japan—despite not taking a formal position on the sovereignty of the disputed territory between Japan and China. Moreover, expanded training with the JSDF for such operations both in Japan and by hosting JSDF forces in the United States seeks to limit the potential for an unfavorable escalation of military tensions between Japan and China.

The war of words between Japan and China and between Japan and South Korea over history issues also generates some negative effects on the United States. While these history issues are not a new aspect of Japan’s postwar security development, they take on a new importance as the United States seeks to deepen partnerships with multiple states in the region as part of its rebalancing strategy. Japan’s frosty relations with South Korea—which persisted during the period of DPJ governance and intensified under the Abe administration—complicate US security planning for the region and inhibit synergies that would otherwise be possible between the two “spokes” of strong US alliances with the two countries.2 Moreover, the troubled Japan–South Korea relationship also has spillover effects in US domestic politics, as a growing number of local constituencies in the United States wade into the complicated politics of the comfort women, the formal designation of the Sea of Japan, and Takeshima territory issues by seeking to erect memorial statues and revise US school textbook maps and descriptions.³

Japan’s new security practices and explanation of them in the region also have the potential to disrupt the US-China relationship beyond the Senkaku entrapment issue. Japan hands (and US government officials dealing with Japan) often repeat the famous phrase by former US senator and ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield that the US-Japan relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world “bar none”—and arguably this is still true. But the most consequential bilateral relationship is that between the United States and China,⁴ despite not being nearly as cooperative or multifaceted as the US-Japan relationship. China historically has tended to view the US-Japan security alliance with suspicion and sometimes derision but also as a useful “cork in the bottle” on resurgent Japanese militarism.⁵ As JSDF capabilities have increased in the past several decades—beginning with the controversial issue of missile defense in the late 1990s—China has become more critical of US support for Japan’s “remilitarization” (as China often labels it). Japan’s new security relationships with other states in the region—which China views as being encouraged by the United States—can intensify Chinese perceptions of “containment” or “encirclement” by the US military and its allies. Japan’s support of other states with territorial disputes with China6—like the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea—could potentially complicate the delicate balance the United States seeks in its relationship with China.

Managed properly, though, the limited downsides of Japan’s security renaissance for the United States are more than offset by the contributions Japan’s expanded security role in its own self-defense as well as regionally and globally makes to US strategic objectives. Such expanded roles help US defense planners to manage a period of declining defense budgets in the United States and offer new possibilities for synergies using Japan’s advanced technologies and manufacturing prowess as well as regional expertise. The core implication of Japan’s security renaissance for the United States is of a more reliable US ally and enhanced long-term strategic partner in the region and globally, despite continuing vocal opposition in Japan—and in Okinawa in particular—to some aspects of a deepened US-Japan alliance.

Implications for the Asian Region

Japan has gradually expanded its security presence in the Asian region over the past two decades, but it has initiated bilateral military cooperation with other states in the region only in recent years. Japan is now a core contributor in numerous multilateral security institutions in the region, frequent participant in multilateral military training exercises, provider of security-related technical and training assistance—and, more recently, military equipment—to numerous states, and the JSDF and JCG are frequent providers of security in the region (albeit to date generally still in limited roles). The implications of this increased Japanese military engagement with the region depend on one’s perspective or, more often, one’s nationality.

The states of Southeast Asia generally welcome Japan’s expanded security role in the region, despite its wartime invasion and often brutal conduct in those places. For all states in the region, Japan represents another option for security cooperation, beyond the United States and China. More choice is better, seems to be the mantra of the ASEAN states—even those more closely aligned with China, such as Cambodia and Myanmar.

Japan’s new security partnerships in the region have been pursued to the deepest level with Australia, to the degree that some have begun to refer to the Japan-Australia connection as a quasi alliance.7 Although a lively debate is taking place in Australia today about the best way to accommodate China’s rise, the benefit of having an additional security partner in Japan is not among the contentious points. Australia and India, which also has increased military-to-military ties and joint exercises with Japan, are both currently pursuing new opportunities to purchase Japanese military technology and equipment under the relaxation of Japan’s arms export restrictions that took place in 2014. Although a recent proposal for Australia to acquire Japanese-made diesel submarines to enhance Australian capabilities around the South China Sea and to deepen military ties with Japan was not realized, that this was even on a possible agenda illustrates the significant change that has taken place in Japan’s security policies in the past decade.

In the 1990s, before Japan began direct military-to-military operations in the region, the JCG (with some indirect support from the JMSDF) played an important role in combating piracy in the region, contributing to the reduction in the number of incidents from hundreds a year to virtually none in the past several years. Building on the experience of working with coast guards of several states in the region, the JCG and now JMSDF have begun to work as well with the naval forces of some states on improving capacity and capabilities for self-defense. This self-defense-only mandate is important to stress, both in terms of implications for the region and in understanding continuing redlines in Japanese military policy despite the renaissance in thinking about best practices for the twenty-first century. The view of those states benefiting from such assistance (including the Philippines and Vietnam most extensively), of the United States, and, of course, of the Japanese themselves is that capacity building for territorial defense is a stabilizing measure for the region and promotes the continued peaceful interaction of states in the region.

To China, a rival claimant to territories in the South China Sea, Japan’s provision of security assistance to other states to enhance their capacity to counter China’s growing capabilities is destabilizing and unwelcome. Moreover, the Chinese resist the linkage Japan has made of China’s claim to Japan’s territory in the East China Sea and China’s claims in the South China Sea. In addition, as previously discussed in the context of the US-Japan alliance, China is increasingly critical of enhanced capabilities of the JSDF and JCG as Japan expands its roles and missions within the US-Japan alliance as well as on its own. From Japan’s perspective, its growing military capabilities vis-à-vis China are purely defensive, and the enhanced deterrent effect of Japan’s greater capabilities should lead to a more stable region and make a military conflict between China and Japan (in particular over the Senkaku Islands) less likely.

Deeper security cooperation between Japan and South Korea is stymied by history at present, as it was in earlier periods, though to a lesser—and less emotional—degree. As Japan’s capabilities and engagement with the region and globally continue to increase, and if South Korea continues to seek to expand its regional and global role, increased security cooperation between these two natural allies is inevitable, even if years away.8 One implication of Japan’s expanded regional role for South Korea is the opportunities this provides, even modestly, for the two states to work together away from the sensitive area around Korean territory itself, where a physical Japanese military presence is still anathema to the general public.

Implications for Global Security

Japan’s gradual security awakening has led to a marked increase in Japan’s contribution to cooperative international security activities, such as UNPKO and more ad hoc joint security efforts, and it offers the potential for further such increases as outlined in Japan’s 2013 national security strategy, which calls for greater proactive contributions to peace globally. Scholars such as Bhubhindar Singh and Lindsay Black have documented Japan’s increased international contributions of the recent past,⁹ and new security legislation recently passed in the Diet authorizes further contributions in a number of areas. The 2015 US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation also tout plans for an expanded global security contribution by Japan.

However, Japan’s power relative to other states in the region and worldwide is shrinking, its resources are severely strained by interest on huge government debt and a troubling demographic future, and the security challenges it faces close to home are increasing in orders of magnitude. These realities suggest that despite a new willingness to consider international security contributions and new capabilities and institutions for effectively making such contributions, in fact such new commitments are not likely to be substantially larger in the coming years than the notable increases in the past decade.

That said, one lesson gleaned from careful examination of Japan’s post–Cold War security transformation is that significant improvements in Japanese capabilities and contributions are possible without significantly more spending—through improved efficiencies in procurement, better institutional management, and more effective and targeted strategies and practices. Japan’s defense budget was more or less unchanged from 2003 to 2012, yet both its capabilities and operations improved substantially. Moreover, Japan’s underlying regional and global strategy of proactive contributions to peace is not limited to the activities of the JSDF. Japan has long linked its ODA policy to contributions to global peace and stability, for example, but under the new 2015 ODA charter, it has even more closely connected the importance of economic development and social stability to the long-term achievement of peace.10

While Japan’s ODA budget is much less than at its peak in the 1980s and is not set to increase in the near term, institutional innovations and greater cooperative efforts across government arguably will lead to greater impact. It should not be forgotten that Japan was, apart from the United States, by far the largest donor to the reconstruction of Afghanistan in the first decade of the present century—illustrating in practice the linkage between military security and ODA.¹¹ More recently, Japan’s innovative ODA financing via low-interest yen loans for Syrian refugee assistance to Jordan and to Turkey shows how new institutional practices can create better outcomes at virtually no cost.¹² Japan’s 2014 relaxation of arms export restrictions is another area where Japanese technology and manufacturing prowess may constitute a global security contribution at no direct additional cost to Japan’s budget (and, indeed, perhaps in the medium term potentially at a savings to Japan’s own weapons development and manufacture through cooperative partners and efficiencies of scale). In sum, the global implications of Japan’s security renaissance have already been visible to those affected and will likely become more widely visible in the coming years.

Next Steps and Wild Cards in Japan’s Security Future

Japan faces a number of challenges domestically and internationally in the coming decade. Domestically the return of the Japanese economy to a period of steady growth is the most important challenge, as this is inextricably linked to Japan’s fiscal and budgetary health as well as Prime Minister Abe’s political ability to implement further security policy innovation. In the medium term, however, Japan’s rapidly aging and gradually shrinking population also poses significant security challenges for Japan. Internationally, China’s continued (if slowed) rise economically and militarily together with increased global economic competition and global security cooperation will also push Japan to further internationalize its approach to military security. In response, Japan will need to consider expanded regional security cooperation and perhaps even revision of its long-standing “peace constitution.” The next national elections—in the Lower House, by December 2018—will offer political parties new opportunities to further illustrate the renaissance in Japan’s security approaches to coming challenges and voters an opportunity to influence the next steps of Japan’s security future. Japan’s regional security environment is constantly evolving, however, with many uncertainties. Japan’s future security path will be determined in part by these uncertainties and by political decisions made in other states in response to such change.

A Changing Japan

Japan’s domestic politics have been in flux since the early 1990s and still have not reached a new equilibrium despite several major political realignments via shifting political party composition.13 Prime Minister Abe’s leadership has greatly shaped Japan’s security renaissance and will provide a lasting legacy for Japan’s security future. At the time of this writing—after the September 2015 reelection of Abe as president of the LDP for a second three-year term and with his popularity far above any political rival after the July 2016 Upper House election—it seems likely that he will lead his party into national elections in the Lower House again, which must be held sometime before December 2018.

The fractured state of Japan’s political opposition—which has greatly benefited Abe’s political agenda—will not continue indefinitely, however. Forces opposing Abe’s agenda—both outside and inside the LDP—may coalesce to present a true challenge in a future election, different from the unsuccessful attempt in advance of the Upper House elections in July 2016. One aspect of this opposition may coalesce around the contentious security politics that were strongly in evidence in 2015—though, as before, the primary concerns of voters will continue to be about the state of Japan’s economy and the prosperity of Japanese citizens. Here Japan faces many challenges that will greatly, if indirectly, affect its security future.

Japan’s continuing demographic evolution into uncharted territory will play a major role in its economic and security future. It is very difficult to revive an economy with staggering public and private debt and a shrinking and super-aging population. Politicians naturally lean toward quick and dramatic fixes. These problems, however, demand sustained attention on multiple levels. They also require addressing problems that Japan has faced for decades. Japan’s birthrate slipped below replacement levels in 1974. The bubble economy burst in 1990. Women have never had equal opportunity in the workplace. Japan’s previous limited experiments with even low levels of immigration generated a wide variety of problems in a country where 98.5 percent of the residents are ethnically Japanese. More effectively addressing each of these longstanding challenges will be necessary, however, to boost Japan’s long stagnating economy and to keep the country from falling even further behind relative to its neighbors.

In the area of military security, Japan’s shrinking working-age population will have real consequences. As noted by Toshi Yoshihara, “The cost of fielding troops for combat will rise as manpower availability dwindles”—and dwindle it will. “By 2030,” Yoshihara continues, “SDF-eligible males will fall to less than 5 million”—from a peak of nine million in 1994 and six million in 2015.14 Japan’s advanced technology will go only so far to protect Japan—and, in any case, someone has to pay for it.

Beyond demographics and the concomitant drain on government finance, Japan faces countless other economic challenges. Its experience in the past two decades does not instill confidence that new political leadership will emerge to implement the sort of bold solutions that economists suggest are necessary to fundamentally transform the Japanese economy in the twenty-first century back to global competitiveness across many sectors. The TPP idea holds some promise for helping Abe and perhaps his successor to implement some of the structural reform to the economy attached to his “third arrow”—but implementation of TPP remains stalled, and even these reforms would mark only a down payment to the sort of structural reforms that are widely seen as necessary for the Japanese economy to reach the growth rates of its neighbors.

Without robust growth, Japan not only cannot pay for its more ambitious defense outlays and other proactive contributions to peace such as capacity building of the defenses of other states and generous ODA to promote peace but also loses regional and global stature. Japan’s soft power has been strong for half a century—but its essence has shifted in the past several decades away from being a beacon of democracy and high-growth economic prosperity to the “cool Japan” of excellent cuisine and cutting-edge fashion and design.15 This is not enough to balance China’s growing soft power, which is still linked to its economic success and ability to lift the poor out of poverty through jobs—jobs created by Chinese economic growth; nor will Japan’s calls for respect of the rule of law and international institutions be as strong without Japan itself being seen as a beacon for future success.

Japanese society also has transformed in response to the many challenges Japan has faced throughout decades of economic stagnation in ways that also affect its security future.¹⁶ Political conservatives’ efforts to encourage women to bear more children and to reintroduce “patriotic education” into public schools notwithstanding, R. Taggart Murphy seems on track about the societal limitations of Japan’s security future when he writes, “In the era of the gyaru [trendy women reluctant to marry], the herbivore male, and the otaku [nerd culture]—not to mention a rapidly aging society—there is no going back to the 1930s and millions of young men thirsting to die for the emperor.”¹⁷ This is a good thing, but concerns of many social conservatives in Japan about the low level of patriotic feeling in Japan also deserve attention—though not necessarily in the ways many social conservatives suggest.

Japan’s topsy-turvy domestic politics of the past two decades have both frustrated and alienated many voters. Political movements and political parties rise and fall, party affiliation has weakened to a point that “unaffiliated” is now the majority political affiliation, and voter turnout has declined markedly in the past four national elections, to only 52.7 percent in the December 2014 Lower House election (down from nearly 70 percent in 2009). True solutions to Japan’s long-term economic stagnation and ballooning government debt remain elusive.18 Despite this challenging political environment, however, real discussions and debate over Japan’s proper level of security preparedness and contributions have been taking place, with notable implementation of a consistent medium-term plan across political parties and political leadership.

This is not to say that there is a consensus about Japan’s recent moves or need for future innovation. In particular, the hugely divisive issue of possible formal revision of the postwar constitution—for the first time since its adoption in 1947—remains deeply contested, whether over the revered Article Nine or other elements of the constitution. Mass public demonstrations, acrimonious debates in the Diet, and scathing opinion pieces in the media from multiple angles show that Japan’s security policies remain a divisive political issue, with a potential to shift in new ways in response to a security shock or dramatically shifting regional tectonics.

A Changing Region

There are many regional wild cards in Japan’s security future. Despite decades of stability that has undergirded the region’s remarkable economic growth, the region has faced—and will continue to face—numerous possible catastrophic security threats: renewed war on the Korean Peninsula or, worse, a nuclear provocation by North Korea; a war between China and Taiwan that draws in the United States and Japan; a miscalculation in the daily close operations of Japanese, Chinese, and US military and coast guard forces around the Senkaku Islands escalating into a major military conflict. Such massive escalations seem unlikely because of careful planning and calculated actions by the states involved but cannot be dismissed—and will continue to be a primary factor in Japanese defense planning, as they will in the defense planning of other states.

Even a lower-level security incident could spark a new stage of Japanese security engagement with the region, or movement to spend more on defense or to develop even greater military capabilities—as the North Korean Taepodong missile overflight of Japan in 1998 led to the development of long-opposed missile defense cooperation with the United States and development of indigenous surveillance satellites. Note that Japan’s ally, the United States, more than doubled its military spending after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on its territory, despite the huge deficit spending this required. Japan’s more recent concern with gray-zone conflict, particularly related to the Senkaku Islands, could also evolve into an actual limited fighting conflict, shaping the next steps of Japan’s security renaissance.

China will continue to be a major driver of Japan’s evolving security strategy, and, as with Japan’s economic challenges, the future of the Chinese economy is a major wild card in Japan’s security future. China’s economic slowdown in 2015 and devaluation of the yuan could have positive implications for Japan’s security future by slowing the growth of Chinese military spending and potentially leading to more positive outreach to Japan by Chinese leaders seeking to promote more Japanese investment and trade with China. Alternatively, however, a broader economic slowdown in China could lead to further scapegoating of Japan for China’s problems. Either way, China’s future will play an outsized role in Japan’s future.19

The broader dynamics of this changing region will also affect the next steps in Japan’s security renaissance. For several decades now a contest for regional leadership has been under way. The latest stage of this contest is no longer for outright leadership by any one player—whether Japan, China, or the United States—but a complex multipolar courting of support via many different means, including economic, soft power, and military cooperation. An important aspect of Japan’s security renaissance is Japan’s foray into the military cooperation arena. How deeply Japan develops further military partnerships in the region will depend on other regional actors as well as domestic politics in Japan.

The Continuing Legacies of Militarism and Antimilitarism

Events and coverage surrounding Japan’s commemoration in 2015 of the end of World War II starkly illustrate that Japanese leaders will continue to struggle with the legacies of Japan’s colonialist and militarist past for the foreseeable future. One of the implications of Japan’s security renaissance is that Japan needs to more effectively address this primary history issue in order to more smoothly proceed with planning for the security challenges of the mid-twenty-first century. Whether or not this will happen, however, remains a wild card in Japan’s security future. Skeptics of Prime Minister Abe’s efforts to address the issue question whether he possesses the resolve to address it, but even putting this question aside, it is clear that the compromises evident in his 2015 statements about Japan’s wartime past reflect the political agenda of important constituencies in the conservative coalition in contemporary Japanese politics. If the LDP is to remain in power, as looks likely for the foreseeable future, future prime ministers will also be constrained by such influential political actors on the right and far right.

The sustained, organized opposition to much of the Abe government’s security agenda—and especially the 2015 security legislation related to CSD—strongly suggests that Japan’s postwar antimilitarist legacy will also continue to critically shape Japan’s security future. Contrary to what some expected, younger generations of Japanese have not shown markedly different attitudes about Japan’s security posture than older generations; in some areas, in fact, older generations are more hawkish in their views related to some security issues, despite the purportedly stronger pacifism of the early postwar years.20 Thus, although the political parties that have most represented the views of the more dovish elements of Japanese society have been on the decline for quite some time, public attitudes continue to reflect these preferences, and the LDP risks a serious backlash if it fails to heed these views. The long history of the LDP over more than half a century shows that it has been willing to sacrifice first-choice policies in favor of staying in power, sacrifice it has repeatedly made in the area of security policy preferences over the years.²¹ The multiple compromises to the package of security legislation passed in the Diet in September 2015 show that the LDP remains adept at advancing its agenda even in stages.

A reversal of the past several years of security-related legislation and practices under a new government seems very unlikely given that when the DPJ was in power it advocated for many of the same sorts of policies and that the security policy innovation of recent years has also been the result of political compromise. Thus, the more pertinent wild card is whether the influence of Japan’s antimilitarist political forces will further decline in the coming decades to allow for a much more muscular Japan than seen to date. One can imagine future “shock” scenarios that could lead to such a major political transformation, but absent such a shock, a wholesale abandonment of this antimilitarist legacy of the past seems quite unlikely.

The United States and Japan: Toward Implementing the 2015 Defense Guidelines

This book has focused on a decade that began at a high point in US-Japan relations at the end of the Koizumi period, weathered the turbulence of the early DPJ governance years, and has emerged post–March 11 and under Prime Minister Abe’s return at a peak in US-Japan security cooperation. Few question the resilience of the alliance today even despite obvious obstacles ahead related to the inability to proceed with long-standing agreements related to Okinawa and continued challenges to coordinating policy vis-à-vis China. Nor do many expect any future path other than the broadening and deepening of the security relationship between the United States and Japan in the coming years—though the pace of this broadening and deepening continues to be a question. Still, there are challenges to implementation of current plans and always the potential for a crisis, whether caused by one of the long-standing possible regional security contingencies outlined in the preceding pages (which the guidelines are meant to mitigate against) or by an individual incident like the rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three US servicemen that sparked widespread anti-base protests in Okinawa in 1995 or an accident that harms or threatens the local population around a US base in Okinawa or elsewhere in Japan.

Despite new US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation in 2015 that seek to develop more advance planning for security contingencies, it is not clear how a crisis would unfold vis-à-vis the US-Japan alliance. The new security legislation passed in September 2015 allows for more advance planning of such coordinated action and is expected to lead to more multilateral exercises in the coming years as the legislation is implemented. Still, there remains no unified US-Japan combined military command and little prospect of one given all three historical legacies that continue to affect Japan’s security planning. Coordination and preparation of joint action will continue to require concerted effort.

Japan’s recent moves to more operational capabilities and a regional role for the JSDF, as well as more realistic discussions of Japan’s security challenges, allow for deeper coordination between the United States and Japan not just to address Japan’s own security—which, after all, is the core function of the alliance from Japan’s perspective—but also to work together more closely on ensuring peace and security in the Asian region as a whole, which is the primary purpose of the alliance from the US perspective and now also a “core mission” of the MOD.22 Both states benefit from the latest round of alliance deepening: Japan can feel more secure in its ability to address or deter new security contingencies it fears, and the United States has a new partner for a number of important regional and global security challenges it perceives as well as more burden sharing in the possible defense of Japan. Such win-win dynamics have created unprecedented levels of public support for the alliance in both countries, which should help with weathering a crisis that might appear. Both states—together and individually—will continue to recruit new partners to help address the rising challenges of the mid-twenty-first century, but no other state in the region can offer the range of capabilities and history of cooperation as the United States and Japan do for each other.

While long-standing voices in Japan calling for more autonomy for Japan’s military forces have been unusually silent in recent years, we should not assume that they will remain so indefinitely—particularly as conservative voices vie for power in the post-Abe political order that is to come. Moreover, there continue to be regular expressions of concern about abandonment of Japan at a time of crisis, requiring regular reassurance by the United States. These long-standing aspects of the complex postwar US-Japan relationship will remain possible disruptors of the alliance in the medium term.

The concentration of US forces in Okinawa presents the greatest challenge for alliance managers and for Japanese politicians. Despite Prime Minister Abe’s progress on many areas of the common alliance agenda in his first three years back in office since December 2012, the controversial relocation of Futenma Air Station continues to face serious local political opposition—fully two decades after the events that led to the plan to relocate the base in the first place. Organized local political activism against the long-term presence of US forces in Okinawa at current levels is only intensifying. At the same time, China’s rapid rise of offensive military capabilities poses new threats to the concentration of US and Japanese military forces in any one place, which has already led to the removal of some US forces from Okinawa beyond what was envisioned after the last comprehensive review of US force distribution in the Defense Policy Review Initiative (DPRI) conducted from 2002 to 2006. Given the escalating cost estimates of relocation of US forces to Guam, however, and continued reluctance of both alliance managers and local communities on the Japanese main islands to host US forces, it is difficult to see innovative solutions to this challenge emerging in the near term; in the medium term, a greater regional distribution of US forces seems likely given growing Chinese military capabilities, but this alone will not address the conundrum of US force concentration in Japan—and, in particular, base concentration—in the short term.

Thus, while the alliance is on a positive trajectory, the complex historical legacy of the now seventy years of a shared security agenda between Japan and the United States under greatly disproportionate American power will continue to challenge alliance managers and Japan’s elected officials, despite the renaissance in Japan’s approaches to its security seen these early years of the twenty-first century. Threaded together with new responses to the continued historical legacies of both militarism and antimilitarism in Japan’s past, the United States and Japan seem destined to continue forging joint solutions to regional and global security challenges in an era in which the relative power resources of both states are in decline.

Japan’s future security choices will be informed by its past, but Japan will not return to its past—neither a militarist past nor a purely antimilitarist one. Japanese security politics and policies have entered a new stage from which there is no return. In the coming decade, the JSDF will increase its presence overseas in training with friendly states, providing disaster relief, and engaging in at least limited joint operations to promote regional and global security. JSDF officers, together with their MOD colleagues, will become even more visible in world capitals and in multilateral institutions as they represent Japan to create a safer security environment. At home, political debates will continue to rage—including new public protests—about the degree to which Japan should expand its contributions to regional and global security and the sort of capabilities the JSDF should develop. These debates will continue to become more grounded in awareness of the physical threats Japan faces and the dynamics of military cooperation overseas but will also reflect peculiarities and limitations based on the legacies of Japan’s distant and more recent past.

The next steps of Japan’s security renaissance will depend on a number of choices made by the Japanese people and political leadership—and the peoples and political leaderships of a number of different states. This interactive dynamic between the international environment and Japan’s domestic politics will shape both Japan’s security future and the future security environment in East Asia and beyond.