Japan’s Rearmament
For people interested in the Far East, Japan’s rearmament is one of the biggest news stories to hit the region. It is historically significant for the Japanese, with their pacifist constitution being in force since the end of the Second World War in 1945.
On September 16, 2022, Fumio Kishida, the Prime Minister of Japan since 2021, released three new versions of national security documents focusing on national security, national defence strategy and national defence programme.
The papers are the first significant change to Japanese defence policy since 2013; documents are also blunt regarding the threats facing the Japanese home islands being described as ‘the most severe and complex security environments as the end of World War II’.
One of the fundamental changes they made to the Japanese military budget was a move away from spending 1% of the national GDP, and national defence was the standard North Atlantic Treaty Organisation convention of 2% of GDP.
Currently, as a share of GDP placed in context, the United States of America only spends 3.1% of national GDP and is expected to decline to 2.8% by 2033. The current economy of the United States is currently at in terms of GDP $26.854 trillion. In comparison, Japan’s GDP is at $4.4 trillion and is the world’s third wealthiest nation.
Regarding Japan’s chief Pacific rival, the Chinese government announces defence expenditure information annually.
In March 2023, China announced a yearly defence budget of RMB 1.55 trillion ($224.8 billion)1, marking a 7.2 per cent increase from the 2022 budget of RMB 1.45 trillion ($229.6 billion).
Why Japan Wants to Rearm
The current president of Japan is pursuing the rearmament and re-militarisation of his nation, which is quite surprising due to Fumio Kishida supporting policies of nuclear disarmament and coming from the piece wing of the Liberal Democratic party (自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō).
Three massive geopolitical threats threatened the survival and independence of Japan, with the Japanese government calling the Chinese ‘greatest strategic challenge ever to securing the peace and stability of Japan’.
The other two significant threats to the Japanese were the North Koreans and Russians. People in predominantly Europe forget that Russia stretches from Eastern Europe to the Japanese archipelago with the Sakhalin Island.
The Japanese did not favour rearmament and remilitarisation for two fundamental political reasons. First, Japan lost World War II and the United States in retaliation rather than trying the Japanese culture or its independence as a people.
America opted for a truly American and unique strategy to integrate Japan into the global economy, maintain Japanese identity and enforce a Japanese peace constitution.
An essential tenet of the pacifist constitution is Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which contains the No war clause.
It occurred on May 3, 1947, immediately after World War II. The text of the article of the Japanese Government formally renounces war as a right of sovereignty and refuses to settle disputes using military force.
The second or most fundamental reason the Japanese did not maintain a strong military was the security provided by the United States during the Pax Americana.
Unfortunately, the Japanese know Americans are no longer interested in global affairs and being the world’s policeman.
Since the election of William ‘Bill’ Clinton in 1992, American presidents have been increasingly focused on internal American politics, and the American public has voted for increasingly isolationist presidents.
George W. Bush went against this mould primarily due to the wars in Afghanistan that focused American political presidential leadership mainly in that part of the globe, which prevented George W. Bush and his successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, from focusing on the Pacific.
It must be stated that it wasn’t Donald Trump and his successor, Joe Biden, that saw American foreign policy moving from the European continent to the Pacific.
Even with the seachange, the American Navy has consistently shrunk since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and no longer can secure the world shipping lanes.
According to the geopolitical analyst, author, and YouTube Peter Zilhan, America’s allies increasingly have to fend for themselves in a more chaotic and disorganised world.
Why Japan Needs Weapons
With the USA being overstretched with the war in Ukraine and when it comes to pursuing a naval policy with the US destroyers down to 150 and a focus on supercarriers, which are nation killers are not practicable when it comes to protecting the world’s oceans, Japanese must rearm.
With this environment, North Korea, China and Russia have more missile capability than the Americans and Japanese have in that region.
Japanese coastal defence missiles are currently limited to a range of just 200 km; even the air missiles Japan has acquired from Norway are only capable of 480 km.
This is not something the Japanese can tolerate any longer, with the Japanese planning to at least have the capacity to launch missiles able to reach targets at least 16,000 km, which is far enough to give the Japanese the capabilities to attack Beijing and Pyongyang in retaliative strike.
The Japanese government that the only reason they would ever use this capacity in a first strike and not a retaliative strike would be if they had solid Intel that North Korea, China or Russia was planning to attack Japan or its allies in the Pacific.
Opening phases of Japan’s rearmament were the purchase of Tomahawk missiles from the USA and a focus on domestic production within the Japanese home islands.
Furthermore, the Japanese government has contracted Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to produce a Japanese homegrown type XII missile.
The Japanese government is moving quickly in a missile-buying bonanza to become less independent internationally from outside sources inside the Japanese home islands. Sipri stated that Japan gets 80% of its missiles from the USA.
Problems With Japan’s Rearmament
The Japanese plan to rearm has one massive problem: the rearmament programme’s ability to have the population size necessary to fight a war on the battlefield and within industries.
Japan’s objective to improve the security situation in the region may not be feasible with Japan’s declining demographics, and its military has a problem with over 16,000 positions that cannot be filled.
If the Japanese cannot replace personnel, it is doubtful they could automate in time with the projection of the Chinese invading Taiwan within the next five years, nor is it possible to increase its birthrate in time.
The Japanese birthrate has been below replacement levels since the 1970s, partly due to the oil crisis in the early 70s and the issues in Japan and the ones being faced by most developed and industrial nations throughout the world.
The Japanese issues are caused by modern lifestyle, culture, and other factors that cannot be easily fixed, which Japan has been trying to fix for over three decades.
An option the Japanese could use is immigration. Unfortunately for Japan, South Korea and China, these are Monotonicity. Unlike their Western counterparts, they don’t have the option to bring immigration due to their protection attitudes to their culture.
Westerners, particularly people part of the Anglosphere, who are the English-speaking peoples, may perceive this as racist because if they moved to these nations, no matter what they do, they would never be considered Chinese or Japanese.
Western countries deduce they have this attitude toward culture. Still, it was decided politically and culturally to move away from a monoculture into a multicultural society, which these nations, as stated above, don’t have that option as a means to regrow the population numbers.
Chinese Internal Issues
The geopolitical analyst and author Peter Zilhan predicts that this decade will be China’s and Russia’s last decade as a serious international power, and he gives two main reasons for this.
The first one is a terminal demographic issue in these two nations that won’t start to recover until the twenty-second century.
The second reason is that the Russian Federation cannot maintain its multi-ethnic empire without a sufficient population, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is unlikely but possible to maintain CCP leadership.
For these two reasons, war with China or Russia is highly possible.
Within the context of this article, China is the biggest problem for Japan.
The Chinese Communist Party is facing a perfect storm with an undercounting of its population by at least 100 million and China missing over 80 million women who have never been born due to the impact of the one-child policy.
The one-child policy was implemented due to the CCP’s ideology that allowed for state intervention, state eugenics and the overall attitude that the state has the right to play an active part in its population’s lives.
Because of these beliefs, the one-child policy, which started in 1979, limited Chinese couples to only one child due to the fear of mass starvation.
The long-term impact of that policy 40 years later is that millions of girls that could have been born have been aborted due to the desire to continue on the family name in the Chinese society that is more favourable to males.
Also, due to China’s declining demographic, it is a country that is getting old before it can get rich, in contrast to its neighbour Japan, which faced the same issue and has faced the same problem since the 1990s.
However, the Japanese managed to reindustrialise and revitalise its economy after it was devastated during World War II and became wealthy enough to pay for its increased ageing population.
As for China, it has run out of time with its Boomer generation hitting retirement this decade and the bulk of them most likely being dead by 2040.
What this means for the China Communist Party to survive even though it will most likely lose any foreign war with the United States and its allies.
There is a solid amoral case for the Communist Party.
Even if it lost the war, it got to choose the time and place of its defeat and dictated the narrative of Chinese history after the event, where the Chinese Communist Party’s priority was survival.
The Chinese Communist Party have rewritten history before with China’s so-called hundred years of humiliation from 1837 to 1949, which is based partly on historical nonsense.
China has been divided for at least half its existence throughout its long history, if not more, depending on how you view Chinese civilisation.
It has repeatedly collapsed, faced rebellions, and has seen Southern China repeatedly breaking away from the North.
Chinese history is long and complicated, and the public only tends to get a slim-down version. Very few people understand the strong ethnic divide between northern and southern Chinese, according to Jerrard Diamond, author of Guns, Steel and Germs.
As for the CCP, it is to survive. If this means at least half a billion dead Chinese, according to Peter Zilhan, that is something they can live with.
