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Japan's rearmament
A few days after the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elections were held in Japan, and the party the Liberal Democratic Party of Abe, won a landslide victory, enshrining the victory of its main policy: Japanese rearmament.
Some of the votes may have been dragged down by mourning the death of an outstanding politician, but the election was mainly a signal of public sentiment about the former prime minister's main legacy: the staggering growth of Japan's military capabilities.
His successor, Fumio Kishida, far from being just a gray bureaucrat, is gradually restoring Japan's status as a military superpower, bringing to fruition Abe's ultimate wish, namely the de facto break with the country's pacifist post-World War II position.
For Japanese history, it is a hairpin turn that turns back the hands to eighty years earlier, when the Empire of the Rising Sun deployed one of the world's most powerful armies at the cutting edge of technology at the time.
Japanese neutrality is a child of devastating defeat in World War II sealed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, which ended Japanese hegemony over East Asia.
To avoid revanchist ambitions while the United States was competing with the Soviet Union for global supremacy, the Americans They wanted Japanese military capabilities to be under their control and enforced the country's disarmament through the insertion of Article 9 of the 1947 Japanese constitution, supervised by the commander of the occupation forces, General Douglas Mcarthur.
Making a virtue out of harm, postwar Japanese politics embraced democracy, completely abandoning all hegemonic vague ambitions and sublimating the loss of empire with economic development.
Throughout the Cold War years, especially in the decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, the United States, was engaged in global confrontation with Moscow in multiple scenarios and with mixed results.
Japan's geo-strategic position
Although the main theater of battle was the "Iron Curtain" in Europe, Japan's position in the Pacific continued to be crucial even after the end of the war, but for another reason.
The Soviets deployed a massive naval force in the Pacific and Washington was faced with a strategic dilemma: Was to prevent U.S. maritime power from dissipating on too many fronts while maintaining the focus in the security of the Atlantic and Europe, from which it could not take away resources.
The port of Vladivostok, home of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, is opposite the Japanese islands and Soviet ships could not sail to the ocean without having to circumvent the archipelago.
In U.S. plans, Japan, economically growing but no longer posing a threat, would protect the eastern flank of the confrontation with the USSR.
The Tokyo government used the same rhetorical weapons that the Americans had provided them with and took refuge in that Article 9 carved by the war victors into the Japanese constitution.
After the disasters of World War II and a strenuous reconstruction, the Japanese were reluctant to invest in the Navy or Air Force again, directing all financial resources into the development of electronics and the automobile industry, which paradoxically, through innovative working methods and an all-Nipponese sense of discipline, challenged the Fordist-style American industry in those years.
The pacifist constitution
Japan's constitution, after 75 years, not yet amended, but the interpretation of Article 9 has gradually become more flexible. The first step was taken in 1954, when the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were established.
Quickly restoring Japan's military strength became necessary after the early 1950s the first Taiwan crisis showed the risks of confrontation in the Pacific.
In the late 1970s, a ceiling of just 1% of GDP was established that could be allocated to the Self-Defense Forces as a concrete manifestation of what they intended.
Japan was content to outsource its security to the Americans, thanks to a mutual security treaty signed after the end of World War II.
The treaty bound the U.S. military would have to defend Japan's sovereign integrity in exchange for the aforementioned pacifist constitution. Under this agreement, the United States established more than 80 military facilities in the country, deploying more than 60,000 troops, the largest presence globally.
With the collapse of the USSR, for a two decades, East Asia became an essentially pacified region. The relative quiet allowed it to become the factory of the world and enabled the rise of Japan's neighbor and historic rival in the region-China.
In the past decade, China's meteoric economic growth, comparable to Japan's parabola in the 1980s, and the strengthening of its military structure, has changed the post-Cold War global security architecture resting on American power.
The importance of Shinzo Abe
Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister in the second decade of the 21st century, in response to or exploiting these circumstances, gained consensus to force the strict interpretation of the constitution by modernizing Japan's self-defense forces and implementing a series of reforms.
Aware of the relative decline of American hegemony, worked for the QUAD format, which brings together the major powers opposed to Chinese expansionism, that is, in addition to Japan itself and the United States, Australia and India, to become operational.
In a further step toward restoring Japan's war power, another Flexible reinterpretation of Article 9, Japanese self-defense forces have begun to participate in maneuvers within this multilateral framework. Abe went so far as to break the nuclear taboo, raising the possibility of stationing U.S. nuclear weapons, with bases similar to NATO's nuclear sharing programs.
These developments were met with a controversial reception by the Japanese public, where the memory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still vivid, and contributed to some electoral defeats of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are not a problem under the Constitution
A nuclear exchange scenario in the Pacific has a low probability and probably the deterrence of U.S. conventional forces is sufficient, but Abe over the years has been probing Japanese public opinion with increasingly extreme ideas, but more and more palatable so that the memory of the war recedes.
The critical point, which is likely to be realized by his successor, has been the battle to double the defense budget. Abe ended his long political career in 2020, and after Prime Minister Suga's short term in office, he entered the Charge Fumyo Kishida, former foreign minister in Abe's cabinet.
The elections have shown that Kishida enjoys broad public trust, even if he is more subdued in character than his illustrious predecessor, but pursues policies in his wake. It is precisely this restraint that could be the key to realizing Abe's dream, in the face of public opinion that, while increasingly aware of the growing threats, does not want the transition to happen too abruptly.
The threatened archipelago
The sea Japan faces is crowded with enemies.
The hardest danger to read, but perhaps the least real, is North Korea's nuclear and missile program, necessary for the Kim family to maintain and have a card to play on international tables. A threat likely destined to remain a bluff.
A recent poll conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun found that as many as 86% of Japanese perceive real danger from North Korea, and 64% of Japanese favor a program to expand the country's defense capabilities.
Strategic challenge is fought with Beijing. Taiwan's policy of "reunification" with China, militarization of artificial islands built in the South China Sea, and intervention in Hong Kong are pushing Japan to accelerate the process of military reinforcement.
The United States shares a commonality with Japan in neutralizing threats from North Korea and China, however it is a threat with a different level of danger.
While for the United States, separated by an ocean, the Asia Pacific quadrant is a piece, albeit a fundamental one, of a global power, any threat in the region for the Japanese is existential.
Today's geopolitical picture will project into the following decades, when China will inevitably overtake the United States in economic size.
The Chinese design, imposed by regional geography, envisions a neutralization of Japan through a military counter-acquisition extending from Sri Lanka to the Solomon Islands.
The Taiwan frontline
China and Japan have a direct dispute concerning the Senkaku Islands (or Diaoyu, as the Chinese call them), located northwest of Taiwan and strategic for potential underwater natural resources and control of sea passage.
The Biden administration reiterated the position taken by the previous Trump and Obama administrations to bring Japan's Senkaku Islands under Article 5 of the Bilateral Security Treaty, which automatically allows for U.S. military intervention in the event of Chinese aggression.
The most critical situation, however, concerns Taiwan's status. The island is only 110 kilometers from the Japanese island of Yunagunijima, where the Japanese have deployed Patriot air defense systems, and 500 kilometers from Okinawa, which houses a massive U.S. military base with 26,000 marines.
In December 2021, Abe had declared that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would pose a direct threat to Japan and that the conflict would drag Japan and the U.S., a concept recently reiterated by Prime Minister's Cabinet Secretary Koichiro Matsumoto.
If for the rest of the world a war in Taiwan could undermine semiconductor supplies, for Japan, an economy that specializes in electronics and automotive applications, it could be a crippling blow to its manufacturing industry.
Total control of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea would allow China to be able to carry out a naval blockade such that it could strangle the maritime artery that connects the archipelago to the Middle East oil wells and European markets via the Indian Ocean.
The peaceful front of the Ukrainian crisis
Total control of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea would allow China to be able to carry out a naval blockade such that it strangles the maritime artery connecting the archipelago to Middle Eastern oil wells and European markets via the Indian Ocean.
Japan would face a blockade similar to that by the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor with the only way out in the Pacific route to California, at that point potentially infested with Chinese submarines, free to enter the open sea from Taiwanese bases.
Adding to this nightmare scenario are territorial disputes with the Russian Federation over northern territories, better known by the Russian name Kuril Islands. Russia, even more so now that it is absorbed in operations in Ukraine, is only a theoretical threat to Japan, ranking far below North Korea and China, but it could synchronize its actions with the other two regional threats.
In fact, theRussian intervention in Ukraine was a geopolitical shock that was felt strongly thousands of miles from the epicenter of events. Japanese sensitivity could be gauged from the energetic reaction of the country, which was one of the first and most energetic countries to independently take concrete action against Russia by freezing the assets of Russia's central bank, banning the export of high-end technology, and removing the country's privileged status for trade.
The gesture that crystallized Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's new course was the Participation, the first in history, of a Japanese leader at a NATO summit.
On that occasion, Kishida said he would consider every option to dramatically increase Japan's defense capabilities, including the ability to strike enemy bases, then ripping open the last screen of non-belligerence anchored in Article 9 of its constitution.
"I am determined to radically strengthen Japan's defense capabilities over the next five years and secure the significant increase in Japan's defense budget needed to implement it."
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