The Security Debate in Japan

Abstract

JAPAN IS EXPERIENCING an increasing military threat and continual political pressure from the Soviet Union as a result of the latter's rapidly expanding military power in East Asia. The increase is due to the new nuclear weapons in the theatre as well as enhanced air, sea, and land forces deployed adjacent to Japan or on territories claimed by Japan. Poor relations with the Soviet Union hit a low point in 1978 when Japan signed a friendship treaty with China instead of with Moscow, much to the Soviets' dismay. The Russians went on to support the Vietnamese by signing a defence treaty with them, and to encourage them in their resolve to invade Cambodia. Not surprisingly, a more vigorous and varied security debate has arisen in Japan. Still, little change has occurred in expediting the slow military modernization in Japan, even under Nakasone, a prime minister who was a wartime naval officer and a vocal proponent of a strong Japanese defence effort. Just after taking office in early 1983, he boasted in Washington that his goal was to make Japan a big aircraft carrier for defence against the Soviet Backfire bomber and to control the four vital straits around Japan to prevent passage of Soviet submarines.' Soviet leaders responded with an implied nuclear threat by warning that Japan's defence policy could lead to a disaster worse than that which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki thirty-seven years before. The internal political and economic obstacles to a strong defence effort remain as formidable as ever. Nevertheless, the changes in military equipment which are in progress will improve Japan's ability to defend itself and to cooperate militarily with the United States. Still, defence specialists in both countries view those as far from adequate to defend Japan's own territory from invasion and attack. Furthermore, the United States still bears a major share of the burden of Japan's defence against the Soviet Union even after thirty years in ajoint defence alliance in which Japan has the world's eighth-largest defence budget. The security debate within Japan is also influenced by the increasingly dominant postwar generation which takes great pride in Japan's economic and technological achievements without the experience of the wartime disaster and with little memory of the postwar austerity.