Japan to Shift Its Military Toward Threats From China
An American worked with Japanese sailors last week on the aircraft carrier George Washington.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 12, 2010
TOKYO — In what would be a sweeping overhaul of its cold war-era defense strategy, Japan is about to release new military guidelines that would reduce its heavy armored and artillery forces pointed north toward Russia in favor of creating more mobile units that could respond to China’s growing presence near its southernmost islands, Japanese newspapers reported Sunday.
The realignment comes as the United States is making new calls for Japan to increase its military role in eastern Asia in response to recent provocations by North Korea as well as China’s more assertive stance in the region.
The new defense strategy, likely to be released this week, will call for greater integration of Japan’s armed forces with the United States military, the reports said. The reports did not give a source, but the fact that major newspapers carried the same information suggested they were based on a background briefing by government officials.
The new guidelines also call for acquiring new submarines and fighter jets, the reports said, and creating ground units that can be moved quickly by air in order to defend the southern islands, including disputed islands in the East China Sea that are also claimed by China and Taiwan. These disputed islands are known as the Senkakus in Japanese and the Diaoyu in Chinese.
Details of the realignment, which was delayed a year by the change of government in September 2009, have been leaking out since large joint military drills this month between Japan and the United States that included the American aircraft carrier George Washington.
Since initially clashing with the Obama administration over an American air base on Okinawa, Japan’s new Democratic Party government has been pulling closer to Washington, spurred by a bruising diplomatic clash three months ago with China over the disputed islands and fears about North Korea’s nuclear program.
The United States has used Japan’s concerns as an opportunity to strengthen ties with the country, its largest and most important Asian ally, and to nudge Japan toward a more active role in the region. In particular, Washington has proposed stronger three-way military ties that would also include its other key regional ally, South Korea.
During a visit to the region last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Japan to join American military exercises with South Korea. In a meeting with Japan’s defense minister, Toshimi Kitazawa, Admiral Mullen said the two nations needed to support South Korea after North Korea’s deadly shelling last month of a South Korean island.
The proposal of three-nation drills has already met resistance in Japan, whose military is severely constrained by its pacifist, postwar Constitution, and also in South Korea, where bitter memories of Japan’s brutal early-20th century march through Asia still run deep. However, Japan has slowly begun to shed some of the postwar phobias against a larger Asian role for its military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, one of the largest and most technologically advanced in the region.
In recent days, Prime Minister Naoto Kan has raised the possibility of changing laws to allow Japanese forces to be sent to the Korean Peninsula to rescue Japanese expatriates in the event of a crisis, and also to search for Japanese known to have been abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
“We need to slowly move forward with consultations with South Korea about whether they would allow in transport aircraft from the Self-Defense Forces,” he told reporters on Saturday.
In another sign of growing coordination, South Korea’s vice minister of defense, Lee Yong-gul, visited Tokyo late last week for talks with his Japanese counterpart, Kimito Nakae, on increasing bilateral cooperation.
Newspaper descriptions of the new Japanese defense strategy did not mention joint drills with South Korea. They did, however, make it clear that Tokyo views North Korea and particularly China as its biggest threats.
The revised guidelines call for shifting some ground forces from the northern island of Hokkaido, where they were originally intended to fend off a Soviet invasion, to its southern islands to fill a “gap” there, the reports said. This gap was exposed by recent Chinese naval maneuvers near islands in the Okinawa chain that raised alarm in Japan.
Under the reported revision, Ground forces would be maintained near their current level of about 150,000 personnel, the reports said.
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