There has been much talk in recent months about the development of Japan’s military and even nuclear might. This has long been a taboo subject, following the imposition of its strictly pacifist, U.S.-written constitution after World War ii, in which Japan pledged to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”
But the tide is turning. A perceived decrease in U.S. involvement in East Asia, along with a rising Chinese neighbor and an unpredictable, potentially dangerous North Korean one, has convinced many in Japan that the time has come to officially loosen its pacifist shackles. Several moves have already been made in this direction.
The Japan Defense Agency has proposed setting up a unit of the Self-Defense Forces (sdf) dedicated primarily to peacekeeping, antiterrorism and other overseas operations. Although the sdf currently has a total of 1,900 personnel on missions abroad, under the current law its activities are limited to joining UN peacekeeping operations and providing humanitarian assistance, as well as providing some logistical support.
However, a look behind the scenes reveals that, although the law places heavy restrictions on Japanese military operations, this emerging movement has already, in the midst of the debate, quietly overtaken its legal boundaries.
Stratfor remarks that “Japan deployed support ships and even an Aegis destroyer to the Middle East to back U.S. operations in the area—while noting that refueling U.S. warships did not mean Japan was contributing to military action in Iraq, as the U.S. ships burned up the fuel from the Japanese tankers before they began bombing runs in Iraq. And discussions of launching attacks on North Korean missile batteries before Pyongyang launches toward Japan are being referred to in Tokyo as defense, not pre-emptive strikes” (July 14). As Stratfor points out, this is but a semantic ploy.
Further, according to Stratfor, “Japan’s fiscal 2004 defense budget reportedly includes financing for the first of two planned helicopter destroyers to replace those currently in service. The new ships are destroyers in name only—they are effectively escort carriers, twice the size of the ships they are replacing, and will be the two largest fighting ships in the Japanese fleet” (ibid.).
This Tokyo is doing in an effort to “get around the constitutional concerns of maintaining a force capable of power projection and belligerence. This is the essence of Japanese defense policy as it evolves even faster in the post-September 11 world. It is becoming a simple matter of semantics to bypass concerns and interpretations of the constitution. And for Tokyo, the next logical step—the complete revision of the constitution—might not be far off” (ibid.).
It appears that it won’t be long before Japan does in fact change its law to accommodate its new reality.