Introduction

Abstract

Is Japan on a path towards assuming a greater military role internationally, or has the recent military normalisation ground to a halt since the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi? In this book, Christopher W. Hughes assesses developments in defence expenditure, civil–military relations, domestic and international military–industrial complexes, Japan's procurement of regional and global power-projection capabilities, the expansion of US–Japan cooperation, and attitudes towards nuclear weapons, constitutional revision and the use of military force.

In all of these areas, dynamic and long-term changes outweigh Japan's short-term political logjam over security policy. Hughes argues that many post-war constraints on Japan's military role are still eroding, and that Tokyo is moving towards a more assertive military role and strengthened US–Japan cooperation. Japan's remilitarisation will boost its international security role and the dominance of the US–Japan alliance in regional and global security affairs, but will need to be carefully managed if it is not to become a source of destabilising tensions.

Japan embarked upon a rapid, even radical, development of its security policy under the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi between April 2001 and September 2006. Japan also responded proactively to the 11 September attacks and the ‘war on terror’, passing an Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law (ATSML) and dispatching the Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) from November 2001 onwards to provide logistical support in the Indian Ocean for US and international coalition forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom. In Iraq and Kuwait, the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) and Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) were deployed from 2004 under the Iraqi Reconstruction Law on non-combat reconstruction missions as part of the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’. Koizumi's administration also set in train a series of initiatives to strengthen the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF) and extend the scope and functions of the US–Japan alliance. Japan's revised National Defense Programme Guidelines (NDPG) and Mid-Term Defense Programme (MTDP) of 2004 began the process of converting the JSDF into a more mobile military geared towards regional and global deployments. Japan committed itself to bilateral technological and strategic cooperation on ballistic-missile defence (BMD) with the US, possibly to a greater extent than any other ally. Japan and the US concluded the Defense Policy Review Initiative (DPRI) in 2006, facilitating the realignment of US bases in Japan, promoting the greater integration of US and Japanese military forces and enabling the US to utilise its bases in Japan for global security functions. Because of these changes, Japan was seen to be moving towards the increased militarisation of its security stance, and to be emerging as a more assertive, ‘normal’ military power and reliable US ally.1

Following Koizumi's departure from the premiership in September 2006, his immediate successor, Shinzo Abe, appeared set to take Japanese security policy in yet more radical directions. Abe unveiled plans for a US-style Japan National Security Council (JNSC) to replace the existing more cumbersome Security Council of Japan, and proposed investigating ways to circumvent Japan's self-imposed ban on the exercise of the right of collective self-defence, revise Article 9 of the constitution and forge closer military links with the US, Australia, India and NATO, with the implicit intention of responding to China's rise. Under Abe's administration, Japanese policymakers even reacted to the North Korean nuclear test in October 2006 by attempting to start a debate on Japan's own nuclear options. Abe's plans for a more assertive Japan on a more equal footing with the US were, however, derailed when his governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was heavily defeated in elections in July 2007, turning over control of the House of Councillors (the upper chamber of the Japanese parliament, the National Diet) to the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ sought to block renewal of the ATSML extending the MSDF's mission in the Indian Ocean, triggering Abe's political downfall in September 2007. Two months later, in November 2007, the MSDF was forced to withdraw from the Indian Ocean and return to Japan.

Abe's successor, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, proved much more cautious on security policy. Although Fukuda did succeed in passing a new Replenishment Support Special Measures Law (RSSML) enabling the MSDF's redeployment to support Operation Enduring Freedom in January 2008, thereby keeping his pledge to then US President George W. Bush to maintain a Japanese presence in the Indian Ocean, he was forced to rely on the extraordinary measure of using the LDP's two-thirds ‘super-majority’ in the House of Representatives lower chamber to override DPJ opposition in the upper chamber. To placate the LDP's dovish coalition partner New Komeito, Fukuda also scaled back Japan's military activities in support of the international coalition, restricting them to refuelling and the supply of water. Fukuda's precarious domestic political situation meant that he was equally hesitant in other areas of security cooperation, shelving plans for a JNSC and backing away from an investigation into the ban on collective self-defence. Fukuda's premiership was also beset with a series of scandals connected with the Ministry of Defense and the JSDF, involving corrupt military procurement practices, potential leaks of military information and failures of civilian control. The impression of scandal was compounded in February 2007, when a Japanese Aegis destroyer failed to follow safety procedures and collided with a civilian fishing vessel off the Japanese coast, killing the two-man crew. These scandals inflicted severe damage on the reputation of the Japanese military establishment and complicated the political debate on Japan's future military stance.

Fukuda's main preoccupation thus became to control these scandals, and his eventual fall from power in September 2008, much as with Abe's, was the result of domestic political failures compounded by travails over security policy. In mid 2008, he toyed with introducing a new permanent dispatch law (kokyu hoan) for JSDF international security cooperation, so as to obviate the need for separate time-bound laws and for extensive National Diet debates over each overseas deployment, and to enable the GSDF and ASDF to fulfil non-combat logistical and reconstruction missions in Afghanistan. Fukuda was frustrated in this endeavour, however, in part by the DPJ, but also by opposition from within the LDP itself and from New Komeito, and by public opposition, all of which were aware of the risks of involvement on the ground in Afghanistan. By late 2008, Fukuda had realised that the DPJ would again block the renewal of the RSSML and demonstrate the inability of his administration to maintain its most public promises of international security cooperation.

Fukuda's replacement, Taro Aso, has so far proved bolder than his predecessor, forcing through the renewal of the RSSML in December 2008 and ordering the dispatch of the MSDF in March 2009 to participate in new international antipiracy missions off Somalia. However, Aso's attempts to maintain a more proactive security stance face similar problems to his predecessors’; his position as prime minister looks uncertain amid domestic political and economic problems, and his freedom of action in security affairs remains constrained by New Komeito and the DPJ.

Radicalism or retrenchment in Japan's security policy?

Has Japan's security policy become moribund after Koizumi's audacious premiership, or is Japan still set on strengthening its military stance, despite changes in political leadership? To some observers, Japan appears to be reasserting its traditional preference for a low-profile defence posture and highly limited alliance arrangements with the US, seemingly confirming the view that strong, even immovable, internal resistance makes deeper security commitments impossible.2 Koizumi's tenure, and the significant remilitarisation of Japanese security that occurred during it, are seen as a short-term aberration. For others, Japan is continuing to slice away at its post-war military constraints. In this view, the caution of Koizumi's successors will prove untenable as Japan faces growing international pressures to adopt a more active security role.3

The objective of this book is to engage in the debate on Japan's post-Koizumi security stance. In particular, it seeks to gauge whether Japan has retrenched its military posture, or whether it has continued on the more radical path evident since 2001. It complements and builds on an earlier Adelphi Paper which covered the period up to mid 2004, updating and adjusting the analysis to take account of the last five years, and looking ahead to future changes in Japan's security policy.4 The book analyses the developments in security policy just outlined, including the Koizumi legacy, security planning under Abe, Fukuda and Aso, fluctuations in US–Japan alliance ties, and defence-related scandals. It also seeks to place these issues within wider, longer-term trends in Japan's defence capabilities, US–Japan alliance cooperation and domestic debates on Japan's security policy.

This is an opportune time to re-examine Japan's security trajectory in light of the preparation of a revised NDPG and MTDP for release in 2009; the implementation of a series of key Ministry of Defense and JSDF reforms from 2009 onwards; and the transition from the Bush era to the Barack Obama presidency in the US, bringing with it new expectations for the US–Japan alliance, and during which the two countries will mark the 50th anniversary of the revision in 1960 of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan. All of these developments will contribute to consolidating existing trends, setting a new long-term agenda for Japan's security policy.

In order to provide context and a means to gauge shortterm versus long-term changes in Japan's security policy and military stance, this book focuses on several key aspects of security policy. All of these areas – defence expenditure, the size and power-projection capabilities of the armed forces, civil–military relations, military-industrial complexes, external military and alliance commitments and domestic institutional and normative military constraints – are ‘classic’ indicators for calibrating the degree of long-term structural change in any state's security policy.5 However, they are especially pertinent to Japan because, in all cases, they constitute self-imposed and self-declaratory standards.6 Hence, if it can be shown – and this book argues that it can – that Japan has progressively eroded or breached its own constraints, a clear picture can be established of Japan's long-term remilitarisation.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the characteristics and evolution of Japan's security policy in the post-war period, in order to provide the essential baselines for judging the extent of its remilitarisation during and after the Koizumi administration. The chapter discusses the range of regional and global security challenges facing Japan, which have propelled it along its more proactive military path.

Chapter 2 investigates the first specific, long-term indicator of Japan's move to a remilitarised security stance by revealing changes in Japanese defence expenditure and JSDF capabilities. The chapter uses a range of information, including statistics relating to deferred payments and the ‘paramilitary’ Japan Coast Guard (JCG) unavailable in previous studies, to demonstrate that the defence budget does not represent an absolute or immutable constraint on Japanese procurement programmes. In contrast to recent short-term speculation about retrenchment in Japanese security planning, this chapter presents long-term evidence of proactive trends in JSDF procurement, for five or ten years hence, which indicate growing powerprojection capabilities, and consequently evolving options to expand participation in US-led multinational and UN operations in East Asia and globally.

Chapter 3 turns to civilian control in Japan and its durability as a prime constraint on Japanese military ambitions. It demonstrates that traditional civilian control structures have been eroding over the last decade, a process accelerated under Koizumi, and continuing apace under his successors. It focuses on a set of defence-related scandals as manifestations of longerterm trends in the erosion of civilian control. The chapter considers how Ministry of Defense and JSDF reform efforts are creating the long-term foundation Japan needs to implement a potentially even more proactive security policy.

Chapter 4 gauges long-term structural change in Japan's security policy by considering the emergence of domestic and international ‘military-industrial complexes’. The chapter examines Japan's changing defence production and the impetus it is creating for structural collusion between political, bureaucratic, military and industrial interests and the effects on procurement decisions. It also considers how Japan's changing defence production is creating transnational linkages with US industry that help tighten US–Japan alliance ties and contribute to breaches of the ban on arms exports – two new key manifestations of external militarisation.

Chapter 5 examines Japan's overseas military engagements in the form of the deployment of military forces through the developing mechanisms of the US–Japan alliance and participation in UN-centred military activities. Just as importantly, Japan's commitments are considered in terms of support for US power projection from Japanese bases for operations in East Asia, the Middle East and beyond. This is because, all too often, Japan's remilitarisation is assessed in terms of a false dichotomy – moves to independently deploy the JSDF overseas versus the alleged constraints of the US–Japan alliance on Japanese military ambitions. Simultaneously, observers have tended to neglect Japan's significant security role in providing bases which help to underwrite, physically and financially, the global US military presence. It is vital to understand that Japan's support for the infrastructure of US global military power is an extension of its own remilitarisation.

The chapter looks at post-Koizumi developments in US–Japan security cooperation, and shows how far domestic political tensions have induced Japan to pull back from alliance commitments. It argues that, since Koizumi, there has been some scaling back of more ambitious US–Japan alliance cooperation beyond East Asia, and there have been problems in implementing elements of the DPRI, the realignment of bases in Okinawa and shocks to alliance confidence over responses to North Korea's nuclearisation. However, it is also argued that alliance ties remain strong, and that the most significant elements of the DPRI, including the co-location of US and Japanese command and control systems and the US use of its bases in Japan to project power beyond the Asia-Pacific, are proceeding regardless of current political debates. In addition, the chapter considers Japan's search for new means to expand external military commitments. It explores the ways in which Japanese policymakers have made special efforts, often in the face of domestic opposition, to forge new security ties with Australia and India, to consider deployment to Afghanistan and to dispatch the JSDF on new anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden.

Chapter 6 analyses long-term changes in the key domestic institutional and normative constraints on Japan's military stance. The chapter investigates the strengthened legitimacy of the JSDF in the eyes of the public; a new propensity to debate transgressing Japan's non-nuclear principles; current and long-term trends in moves towards revision and reinterpretation of Article 9 of the so-called ‘Peace Constitution’; and Japanese public attitudes towards military and patriotic education and the use of armed force for national security ends. It demonstrates that, in all of these areas, Japanese resistance to an enhanced societal status for the JSDF and the efficacy of military power is being eroded, creating in turn a new long-term basis of support for Japan's wider international security ambitions.

Japan's regional and global significance

Taken together, this book presents a set of comprehensive and objective indicators which point towards Japan's continuing remilitarisation. It provides evidence that Japan's security policy is undergoing long-term structural change, predisposing it towards a more assertive military stance, and that domestic political machinations have not halted this process. In fact, the formulation of much of Japan's security policy remains insulated from political fluctuations, and many security-related issues believed to have impeded a more assertive security stance – such as defence procurement and defence-related scandals – are actually manifestations of ongoing structural change, creating the basis for further reform and potentially greater dynamism.

Japan's continuing remilitarisation has important ramifications for international security. The use here of the term ‘remilitarisation’ should not be read as an alarmist warning that Japan is necessarily intent on reverting to the kind of state it became between 1931 and 1945. Japan remains a constrained military actor, reluctant to pursue the full potential panoply of national military capabilities, limited by its junior alliance relationship with the US and its strong residual antimilitaristic sentiment. Nevertheless, it has to be acknowledged that Japan, judged by the objective international yardstick of the key indicators of remilitarisation, which in turn are Japan's own benchmarks, is set upon a long-term trajectory that will see it assuming a more assertive regional and global security role. Japan can certainly in no way be said to be demilitarising or to have reached stasis in its security policy. All the long-term indications point to activism and expansion in its military capabilities and international commitments.

Such expansion clearly affects the East Asian power balance; indeed, in some respects Japan is engaged in a low-key arms race with China, and is hedging its nuclear stance vis-à-vis North Korea. Japan's attempts to enhance security ties with Australia, South Korea and India also impact upon the regional security landscape. Just as crucial, though, is Japan's approach to its alliance with the US. Japan's increasing support for, and participation in, US regional power projection holds the key to Washington's attempts to deter a nuclearising North Korea and a rising China. Similarly, the expanding functional and geographical scope of US–Japan alliance cooperation increasingly holds the key to efforts by US administrations to maintain their state's global military hegemony. This logic is likely to induce Obama's administration and its Japanese counterparts to keep pushing ever outwards the envelope of bilateral military cooperation.

Notes

For examples arguing for a gradually more assertive Japanese military role, see Michael J. Green, Japan's Reluctant Realism: Foreign Policy Challenges in an Era of Uncertain Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Anthony DiFilippo, The Challenges of the US–Japan Military Arrangement: Competing Security Transitions in a Changing International Environment (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002); Gavan McCormack, ‘Remilitarizing Japan’, New Left Review, vol. 29, September–October 2004, pp. 29–44; Jennifer Lind, ‘Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy’, International Security, vol. 29, no. 1, Summer 2004, pp. 92–121; Richard Tanter, ‘With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei Militarization, and the Bush Doctrine’, in Mel Gurtov and Peter Van Ness (eds), Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 153–80; Christopher W. Hughes, ‘Japan: Military Modernization in Search of a “Normal” Security Role’, in Ashley J. Tellis and Michael Wills (eds), Strategic Asia 2005–06: Military Modernization in an Era of Uncertainty (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2005), pp. 105–34; Daniel M. Kliman, Japan's Security Strategy in the Post-9/11 World: Embracing a New Realpolitik (Westport, CT: Praeger/ CSIS, 2006); Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2007); Richard J. Samuels, Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

For examples arguing for continued strong Japanese resistance to further remilitarisation post-11 September, see Thomas U. Berger, ‘Japan's International Relations: The Political and Security Dimensions’, in Samuel S. Kim (ed.), The International Relations of Northeast Asia (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield and Publishers, 2004), pp. 135–69; H. Richard Friman, Peter J. Katzenstein, David Leheny and Nobuo Okawara, ‘Immovable Object? Japan's Security Policy in East Asia’, in Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, Beyond Japan: The Dynamics of East Asian Regionalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 85–107; Paul Midford, ‘Japanese Mass Opinion Toward the War on Terrorism’, in Robert D. Eldridge and Paul Midford (eds), Japanese Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 11–42; Andrew L. Oros, Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity and the Evolution of Security Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Yasuo Takao, Is Japan Really Remilitarising? The Politics of Norm Formation and Change (Clayton: Monash University Press, 2008).

For examples arguing for Japan's long-term remilitarisation post-Koizumi, see Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (London: Verso, 2007); Testuo Maeda, Jieitai: Henyo no Yukie (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2007); Christopher W. Hughes and Ellis S. Krauss, ‘Japan's New Security Agenda’, Survival, vol. 49, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 157–76.

Christopher W. Hughes, Japan's Reemergence as a ‘Normal’ Military Power, Adelphi Paper 368/9 (Oxford: OUP for the IISS, 2004).

The literature on militarisation and militarism is well established in social science, drawing on rich and diverse insights from political science, sociology, social anthropology, economics and international relations. For overall statements of the classical indicators of remilitarisation, see Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1959); Kjell Skjelsbaek, ‘Militarism, Its Dimensions and Corollaries: An Attempt at Conceptual Clarification’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 16, no. 3, 1979, pp. 213–29; Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979 (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1981); Martin Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, Demilitarization and War at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). For debates on civil– military relations and the indicators of remilitarisation, see Harold D. Lasswell, ‘The Garrison State’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 4, 1941, pp. 455–68; Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964); Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: The Free Press, 1971); Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, 2nd edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). For the concept of the military-industrial complex, see Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 1961); Joseph Schumpeter, Sociology of Imperialism (New York: Meridian, 1955); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); Jerome Slater and Terry Nardin, ‘The Concept of a Military- Industrial Complex’, in Steven Rosen (ed.), Testing the Theory of the Military- Industrial Complex (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), pp. 27–60; Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (London: Andrei Deutsch, 1982); Dan Smith and Ron Smith, The Economics of Militarism (London: Pluto Press, 1982); Keith Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

For a history of Japan's self-declared constraints on remilitarisation, see Glenn D. Hook, Demilitarization and Remilitarization in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 1996).