Japan flexing military muscle to counter China
TOKYO—After years of watching its international influence eroded by a slow-motion economic decline, the pacifist nation of Japan is trying to raise its profile in a new way, offering military aid for the first time in decades and displaying its own armed forces in an effort to build regional alliances and shore up other countries’ defenses to counter a rising China.
Already this year, Japan crossed a little-noted threshold by providing its first military aid abroad since the end of World War II, approving a $2-million package for its military engineers to train troops in Cambodia and East Timor in disaster relief and skills like road building.
And after stepping up civilian aid programs to train and equip the coast guards of other nations, Japanese defense officials and analysts say Japan could soon reach another milestone: Beginning sales in the region of military hardware like seaplanes, and perhaps eventually the stealthy diesel-powered submarines considered well-suited to the shallow waters where China is making increasingly assertive territorial claims.
The driver for Japan’s shifting national security strategy is its tense dispute with China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that is feeding Japanese anxiety that the country’s relative decline—and the financial strug- gles of its traditional protector, the United States—is leaving Japan increasingly vulnerable.
“During the Cold War, all Japan had to do was follow the United States,” said Keiro Kitagami, a special adviser on security issues to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. “With China, it’s different. Japan has to take a stand on its own.”
Japan’s moves do not mean it might transform its military, which serves a purely defensive role, into an offensive force anytime soon.
But it is also clear that attitudes in Japan are evolving as China continues its double-digit annual growth in military spending and asserts that it should be in charge of the islands that Japan claims, as well as vast swaths of the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) that various Southeast Asian nations say are in their control.
Japanese officials say their strategy is not to begin a race for influence with China, but to build up ties with other nations that share worries about their imposing neighbor. They ac- knowledge that even building the capacity of other nations’ coast guards is a way of strengthening those countries’ ability to stand up to any Chinese threat.
“We want to build our own coalition of the willing in Asia to prevent China from just running over us,” said Yoshihide Soeya, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Keio University in Tokyo.
Analysts there and elsewhere in the region said their countries welcomed and sometimes invited Japan’s help.
“Japan is joining the United States and Australia in helping us face China,” said Mark Lim, an administrative officer from the Philippine Coast Guard.
Japan is widely viewed as be- ing the only nation in the region with a navy powerful enough to check China.
“Our strategy is to offer hardware and training to create mini-Japanese coast guards and mini-Japanese Self-Defense Forces around the South China Sea,” said Tetsuo Kotani, a researcher at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo.
Under the decade-old civilian aid program to build up regional coast guards, Japanese officials say they are in the final stages of what would be their biggest security-related aid package yet—to provide the Philippine Coast Guard with 10 cutters worth about $12 million each. Japanese defense officials say they may offer similar ships to Vietnam.