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Awakening Japan's sleeping defense
giant
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Renewed indications that Japan may be ready to renounce
half a century of pacifism and take responsibility for
its own external security have unnerved Asian political
leaders who lived under Imperial Army expansionism.
Upper House legislators in Japan's parliament
will decide by June 19 whether to endorse three war
contingency bills that would give the bristling but
shorebound Self-Defense Force (SDF) more leeway in
responding to hostile actions.
Yet the changes
are likely to be more form than substance, and few
observers expect a militarized Japan to upset the
regional security balance - unless it is caught in
tensions between the United States and China.
Conservative factions in the Diet, resentful of
Japan's reliance on US sea power and strategic umbrella,
have been lobbying since 1998 for constitutional reforms
that would allow Japan to dictate its own defense
framework.
In April, Defense Minister Shigeru
Ishiba sounded out Asian reaction by proposing that the
SDF be elevated from its current limited function as an
internal security agency into a legitimate armed forces.
"It is unnatural that we cannot call it so. I believe
the day should come when the SDF is recognized as the
military under a revised constitution and given
appropriate honor and positions without unproductive
debates," he said in an interview with Kyodo news
agency.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi then
delivered an impassioned parliamentary speech in support
of the war contingency bills that even suggested the SDF
might be empowered to launch preemptive strikes on
potential threats.
It is more likely that the
bills will be compromise between tapered strategic
ambition and diplomatic realism, with politicians opting
to keep the SDF on a short leash to smooth regional
sensitivities.
Almost certainly, they will cross
a symbolic threshold by rebadging the SDF as a military
force, and rejecting the post-World War II judgment that
Japan no longer had any right to pursue an independent
security strategy. Asian leaders will be closely
watching whether, as widely expected, this leads to an
easing of restrictions on the type of weapons that can
be acquired by the SDF, and permits Japan to establish a
ballistic-missile capability.
But in practice,
the bills will formalize a quiet process of
transformation that has been under way since the early
1990s, when the end of the Cold War brought a
significant shift of public opinion away from the
left-wing pacifism that has dominated postwar politics.
A re-emergence of domestic terrorism paralleled
a heightened sense of vulnerability over Japan's ailing
economy, and security was firmly back on the national
agenda by the time recession gripped later in the
decade.
Reformers are pushing for the abrogation
of the 1957 Basic Policy for National Defense, which
prohibits Japan from adopting an offensive military
position, or even engaging in collective self-defense
arrangements.
But first they need to confront
the highly charged issue of whether Japan can maintain
its non-aggression policy while simultaneously
renouncing pacifism, the bedrock for decades of
confidence-building since the war. This will only be
possible if legislators revoke Article 9 of the 1947
constitution, with its admonition that the Japanese
people "forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the
nation and the threat or use of force as a means of
settling international disputes".
Under the
terms of the constitution, Japan assumed unilateral
responsibility for internal security but relies upon the
1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the
United States to repel attacks from abroad.
However, there have already been several
revisions of Article 9 that are chipping away at the
notion of a defense force hidebound by a sense of
morality that finds less acceptance among postwar
generations. As far back as 1976, the government
reinterpreted the constitution and defense policy to
allow the SDF to repel an attack on a limited scale.
Then came a 1980s re-evaluation that concluded Japan
could not rely absolutely on US support in the event of
a wider conflict.
The catalyst for this review
was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the
resulting escalation of border tensions in Russia's Far
East provinces, which focused Japanese attention on the
vulnerability of contested islands to the north of
Hokkaido. Occupied by Soviet forces at the end of World
War II, the Sakhalin group of islands is still claimed
by Japan, but the US has shown no inclination to use its
military clout to intervene on Tokyo's behalf.
Instead, Japan began a fleet modernization
program that turned the SDF into the most formidable
Pacific naval force outside the US, equipped with an
advanced air defense capability and anti-submarine
systems.
While defense spending had generally
been subdued through the 1970s, hawks took advantage of
falling public confidence in the nation's political
leaders, who were blamed for apparent diplomatic
failings that led to maritime incursions by North Korean
spy ships in 1999 and 2001.
Pyongyang had
already defiantly tested a medium-range missile in the
Sea of Japan, reviving fears that the US might be
unable, or unwilling, to risk a showdown with
Pyongyang's ally China by coming to Japan's aid. "I
think the [Bill] Clinton administration, perhaps
unwittingly, fed Japanese xenophobia by devoting more
attention to China's economic resurgence than the North
Korean threat. They simply didn't see the Korean
communist threat in the same terms as Japan did," said a
European diplomat.
One outcome was Tokyo's
decision to create its own missile umbrella by
participating in Washington's so-called Star Wars
defense shield and eventually acquiring cruise missiles.
Planning also began for a satellite-based early warning
system that could provide quick intelligence on incoming
missiles without the SDF having to wait for filtered US
information to come through the treaty system. Although
they do not constitute an offensive capability, some of
these initiatives technically violate the spirit of
Article 9. China and North Korea have labeled Japan's
Patriot missile batteries a strategic weapon.
Even the US treaty is no longer above political
criticism, with conservatives questioning whether it
conforms with a constitutional prohibition on collective
self-defense, despite Japan's legal entitlement to do so
under Article 51 of the United Nations charter.
Collective self-defense has been an issue in
Japan since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization voted
for the first time in late 2001 to allow the concept as
a mutual deterrence to terrorism attacks, though few
countries actually responded.
The Japanese
government countered with a legal ruling that any
defensive response must be "within the limit of the
minimum necessary level for the defense of the nation
... [and] the exercise of the right of collective
self-defense exceeds that limit and is constitutionally
not permissible".
Nevertheless, there has been
cross-party backing for many years for the SDF to
support Tokyo's intensive diplomatic confidence-building
within the region by participating in joint security
activities.
In 2001 Tokyo caused a stir by
dispatching naval minesweepers to a multinational
exercise in the Strait of Malacca instead of sending
marine police. It also began attending the US-Thailand
Cobra Gold military exercise as an observer.
Later that year the Diet responded to the
airplane attacks in New York and Washington by amending
the Self-Defense Forces Law and enacting an
Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law so that the SDF
could fire at suspicious vessels "in order to stop
them". Then parliament changed the International Peace
Cooperation Law to allow the SDF to commit forces to
core units of United Nations peacekeeping operations.
The law had been in existence since 1992, but was
restricted to logistical support.
However, all
three measures require that the SDF seek parliamentary
approval before taking any action. Counter-terrorism
operations can only be conducted in Japanese waters and
airspace, or any other area "where combat is not taking
place or is not expected to take place".
Weapons
may only be used by SDF personnel when "an unavoidable
cause exists ... to protect their own lives or safety",
a broad definition that remains a source of contention
within the security establishment.
Until the
covenants are removed, the SDF will be effectively
port-bound while the coast guard and marine police mount
coastal patrols and handle intercepts, relying on the
defense forces only for ground support and intelligence.
Changing this status will not be easy, as the
SDF has deliberately been allowed only a tiny operations
command to ensure that it remains firmly under civilian
control and cannot be influenced by militaristic
tendencies. Overall authority is vested in a
civilian-run Defense Agency that gets its orders
directly from the prime minister. Even the SDF's support
staff and much of its budget are processed through other
public agencies.
There is no lack of cash or
other resources to make the reforms work. The
240,000-strong SDF gets an annual budget of about US$50
billion, ranking Japan among the six top military
spenders worldwide. Its naval and air capabilities match
Western European standards, though they lack the
operational experience that comes from actively engaging
in defense alliances or contributing regularly to
peacekeeping activities.
"In purely logistical
terms, Japan's defense agency is a sleeping giant. They
have high training standards, a very efficient command
structure, access to modern armaments, technical support
at the highest level," said a military attache based at
an embassy in the region.
"[But] what we need to
look at is the political mindset. I don't see any
evidence of militarism or territorial ambition that
should be setting off alarm bells in Asia or disrupting
the security balance."
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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