Once-cautious Japan steps out as key U.S. security partner in region

Seoul, South Korea — Japan is emerging as Washington’s right-hand man in the Indo-Pacific, putting aside its traditional security caution as it takes on trilateral roles in its own backyard, in Northeast Asia, and as far afield as Southeast Asia. 

Japanese Premier Fumio Kishida is set to visit Seoul on Sunday for a summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol. That comes ahead of a trilateral meeting with President Joe Biden later this month as Mr. Kishida plays host to an issue-packed G-7 summit in Hiroshima.

Notably, Mr. Biden’s meeting Monday with visiting Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. featured talk of “trilateral modes of cooperation,” explicitly bringing Japan into the conversation as all three nations confront an increasingly assertive China.

For a Biden administration already stretched by the Ukraine war and other crises closer to home, the slow but steady transition of Japan from pacifist, often passive client into a region-ranging ally and growing military power on Taiwan’s northern and southern flanks has been a welcome shift.

Questions over Japan’s defensive prowess are evaporating as Tokyo muscles up, notably in the maritime, missile and cyber domains, while fortifying its strategic southern islands. As tensions between Taipei and Beijing soar, those islands cover Taiwan’s northeast and command key choke points between coastal China and the open Pacific.

It’s a shift meeting with increasing popular support at home: Confronting China’s expansionism, North Korean missiles and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a new poll out in recent days found that, by a 53% to 45% margin, the Japanese now believe the country’s pacifist constitution — dating back to the immediate post-World War II period — needs to be changed.

Still, the Kishida government is proceeding with caution: Another recent poll by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper found a large majority of Japanese saying they have at least some fear of being dragged into a U.S.-China military clash over Taiwan, and 56% of those polled said Japan’s army should only play a rearguard support role in any war.

And while Southeast Asians may have largely left unpleasant wartime memories of Japanese militarism behind, that is not so for key countries closer to Japan’s shores in Northeast Asia, where both historical grievances and territorial disputes remain open wounds.

Opponents of Japan’s more prominent role in Seoul and Beijing are leveraging emotive clashes over disputed islands to push back, and the budding amity between Japan and South Korea could still go off the rails.

Redefining its role

At the heart of the debate is the evolving identity and role of Japan’s military— the “Self-Defense Forces” that by law and tradition have stuck largely to a narrow role of guarding the homeland, even as Japan was emerging as a global economic superpower.

“We are in the middle of… the most severe and complex security environment,” Mr. Kishida said in a Constitution Day speech May 3. “It is extremely important to position the Self-Defense Forces in the constitution.”

The challenging process of constitutional revision is an ambition of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and minority conservative parties in the Diet, but Tokyo’s military has long been beefing up even under the existing constitution.

That process was launched by the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a noted strategist who coined the term “Indo-Pacific.” Mr. Abe, the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history who was assassinated in September 2020, pressed for a 2015 constitutional amendment to enable the SDF to conduct “collective defense” with allies, rather than pure self-defense.

As China has transformed the regional strategic landscape, demands from allies for a bigger Japanese role are more urgent than ever.

“Tokyo’s motivation is to maintain U.S. extended deterrence, strategically and politically, in response to China’s agitations,” said Haruko Satoh, a regional relations expert at Osaka University. “There is no choice, really, until the situation improves.”

Since 2015, the SDF has added a marine brigade, begun converting two helicopter carriers to F-35 carriers, and purchased an arsenal of cruise missiles with longer-range strike capabilities.

More upgrades are coming. Japanese media report that Tokyo will re-configure its eight Aegis destroyers to carry U.S. Tomahawks with a range of nearly 1,000 miles. Japan’s military cyber forces are also being expanded.

In 2018, Japan conducted its first postwar overseas armored deployment in the Philippines. Three years later, the SDF held its first-ever joint aerial exercises, again with Philippine forces. Manila and Tokyo signed an agreement allowing joint drills, cooperation and military equipment transfer in February of this year.

With U.S. troops this year also boosting their positions in the Philippines, the strategic impact in the area immediately south of Taiwan is clear to strategists in both Washington and Beijing.

Japan’s potent Maritime SDF is a frequent caller at Southeast Asian ports. Japan has “a very professional navy,” said Lance Gatling, a Tokyo-based American and ex-planning officer with Japanese forces. “They are the closest service to the U.S., they operate very closely with the 7th Fleet.”

The Ground SDF is re-posturing. Once tasked with deterring the Soviet Union from invading the northern island of Hokkaido, the force is shifting personnel and resources to the southern Ryukyu Islands, a chain that covers nearly 1,800 square miles northeast of Taiwan.

The main island, Okinawa, hosts a U.S. Marine Division. GSDF troops are deploying anti-shipping and air-defense missiles on key islands.

For long-range missile effectiveness, interoperability is essential.

“These are incredibly complex operations,” said Mr. Gatling. “The Japanese are going to participate closely with the U.S. in training, communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” 

The long shadow of WWII

Tokyo’s shifting defense policy, posture and punch are not riling its public. While Mr. Abe was often described as a hardline nationalist, the more reticent, low-key Mr. Kishida has a moderate reputation.

“Kishida isn’t popular, but he’s not waving the nationalist flag,” said Ms. Satoh. “So, there’s probably less public anxiety about his agenda harboring ulterior motives.”

Denouncing Japan’s recent military build-up as “a return to militarism is a far-fetched, one-dimensional story line,” Ms. Satoh said.

The weight of history is felt far less these days in Southeast Asia. The region was ravaged by Japanese forces between 1941 and 1945, but relations today are excellent.

“I don’t think [the war] resonates now,” said Alex Neill, a Singapore-based Pacific Forum fellow. “You just don’t hear about ‘comfort women’ – who existed in Southeast Asia – the way you do in Korea.”

In Northeast Asia – where Japan colonized Korea from 1910-1945 and assaulted China between 1937-1945, leaving between 14 and 20 million dead – sensitivities are pricklier. Nasty, unresolved territorial disputes aren’t helping.

On Tuesday, a lawmaker from Seoul’s opposition Democratic Party – which has criticized Mr. Yoon’s outreach to Japan – visited the Dokdo islets between the two nations, which are controlled by South Korea but also are claimed by Japan. That sparked a Seoul-Tokyo diplomatic spat just days prior to Mr. Kishida’s visit.

“This is unnecessary: Dokdo is obviously ours,” said Lim Eun-jung, an international relations expert at South Korea’s Gongju National University. “We don’t need to keep showing it belongs to us, but politicians do what politicians want to do.”

Mr. Biden, whose White House state visit earlier this month with Mr. Yoon was notable for its warmth, applauded the conservative South Korean leader for his “courageous, principled diplomacy with Japan, which strengthens our trilateral partnership.” But Mr. Kishida has responded cautiously to the outreach, raising questions of how deep are the roots of the emerging three-way partnership.

“The trilateral train has left the terminal,” stated Mason Richey, an international relations expert at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Ms. Lim is less sure, saying the alliance could still be subject to the shifting winds of domestic politics.

“I think Japan’s leadership is worried about if the Democratic Party comes back [into office] and overturns everything Yoon did,” she said. “That is definitely their concern.”

For its part, China has been strongly critical of Tokyo’s ongoing fortification of the Ryukyu island chain. It, too, is leveraging local sensitivities around islands.

The Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by Japan in the 17th century, and strong localist feelings simmer. Those feelings link to both the traumas of combat during World War II and to the sometimes intrusive presence of American Marines on Okinawa.

An article last month in Beijing’s China Military Online website entitled “Don’t Make Okinawa a Battlefield Again” sided with Okinawa’s Prefectural Assembly: Assembly members have complained to Tokyo about their islands’ militarization.

“The Okinawan people need peace but not missiles,” the article advised. “The Kishida administration should listen attentively to their legitimate claims.”

There have been years of fishing and coast guard clashes between China and Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, known to the Chinese as the Diaoyu islands. Now some Chinese nationalists online are agitating over the Ryukyus, home to 1.45 million Japanese citizens.

“Very interestingly, China has started making sounds about claims to the Ryukyus,” said Mr. Neill, an expert on the Chinese military. “This popped up about 10 years ago and has recently returned to Chinese social media.”