Japan's Re-emergence as a 'Normal' Military Power

Christopher Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136056680
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Is Japan re-emerging as a normal, or even a great, military power in regional and global security affairs? This Adelphi Paper assesses the overall trajectory of Japan's security policy over the last decade, and the impact of a changing Japanese military posture on the stability of East Asia.

The paper examines Japan's evolving security debate, set against the background of a shifting international environment and domestic policymaking system; the status of Japan's national military capabilities and constitutional prohibitions; post-Cold War developments in the US Japan alliance; and Japan's role in multilateral regional security dialogue, UN PKO, and US-led coalitions of the willing. It concludes that Japan is undoubtedly moving along the trajectory of becoming a more assertive military power, and that this trend has been accelerated post-9/11. Japan is unlikely, though, to channel its military power through greatly different frameworks than at present. Japan will opt for the enhanced, and probably inextricable, integration of its military capabilities into the US Japan alliance, rather than pursuing options for greater autonomy or multilateralism. Japan's strengthened role as the defensive shield for the offensive sword of US power projection will only serve to bolster US military hegemony in East Asia and globally.

Chapter 1

Japan’s post-war security trajectory and policy system

Fundamental changes in Japan’s security strategy and policy-making system – in turn precipitated by changes in the international security environment and domestic politics – will ensure that Japan’s recent record of military proactivity is unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon, and that Japan will further shift its overall security trajectory away from its traditionally low-profile approach to regional military affairs.

The Yoshida Doctrine

Japan’s traditional reticence to engage directly in regional military affairs clearly originates from its experiences of catastrophic defeat in the Pacific War; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the US-dominated Allied Occupation; Japanese demilitarisation; the adoption of Article 9 of the so-called ‘peace constitution’ of 1947; and lingering suspicions of Japanese militarism among neighbouring East Asian states. The outcome has been a strong strain of anti-militaristic sentiment amongst Japan’s policy-making elites and general citizenry, and a genuine ambivalence about the centrality and efficacy of military power in ensuring security. Japanese caution about the function of military power was reflected in Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida’s formulation of the basic course for Japan’s security strategy in the post-war era, later known as the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’.

The military path that Yoshida laid down for Japan in the immediate post-war period was alignment – although not necessarily alliance – with the US, coupled with limited national rearmament. Yoshida did not rule out large-scale rearmament and Japan’s re- emergence as a independent military power when the time was ripe, and viewed close US-Japan security cooperation as a temporary expedient.¹ Yoshida realised this policy by seeking and signing the 1951 Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan; the original incarnation of the US-Japan security treaty.

The bilateral security treaty initiated an implicit grand strategic bargain between Japan and the US. Under the treaty, Japan was obliged to provide the US with bases to enable the projection of US military power onto the East Asian continent. In separate agreements, Japan committed itself to assume a degree of responsibility for national self-defence through light rearmament and the formation of the National Police Reserve (NPR) in 1950 and then the National Safety Force (NSF) in 1952 – the forerunners of the JSDF, created in 1954. In return, Japan gained effective (if not explicit, until the revised security treaty of 1960) US guarantees of superpower military protection, including forward-deployed forces in Japan and the extended US nuclear umbrella. In accepting these security arrangements, Japan further gained US assent for the ending of the Occupation, although the US retained administrative control of Okinawa until 1972. Japan’s post-war alignment with the US also earned it economic security guarantees in the form of special economic dispensations by the US, such as access to the US market, economic aid and international economic institutions. Thus, through US sponsorship, Japan was able to regain its place in the international community and, furnished as it was with US military protection, was free to pursue its primary post-war goal of economic reconstruction. In addition to meeting the challenges of the post-war international environment, Japan’s decision to entrust, in large part, its military security to the US enabled its government to suppress and manage the controversial domestic political issue of Japan’s future military role.

Nevertheless, Yoshida was aware that this strategic bargain carried costs as well as benefits for Japan, and that Japan should not commit itself unconditionally. The principal costs of alignment with the US were the classic security dilemmas of abandonment and entrapment. During the formulation of Japan’s basic security strategy in the early stages of the Cold War, Yoshida did not fear Japan’s abandonment by its US military protector because he perceived that the US valued Japan too highly as a central component of its containment strategy in East Asia. However, for successive Japanese policymakers, the military dependence on the US established by Yoshida, and the knowledge that the US as a global power could have interests that superseded those related to Japan, has engendered the fear that the US’s commitment to defend Japan might eventually wane, leaving it highly vulnerable.

The major concern for Yoshida and his successors, though, at the time of the signing of the security treaty and ever since, was the possibility of entrapment in US regional and global military strategy. Japan’s provision of bases to the US could make it a proxy target in a nuclear or conventional conflict in the region, or the US might push Japan towards assuming a role beyond its existing function as part of the defensive perimeter for the containment of communism, pressuring it to become a more active player in the Cold War struggle outside its own national territory. Japan’s particular fear was that the security arrangement might lead to its entanglement in disastrous conflicts on the Korean Peninsula or over Taiwan.

To minimise the risks of entrapment, Yoshida pursued a number of options to limit Japan’s potential military commitments to the US. Under Yoshida’s leadership, Japan emphasised that its security policy was predicated upon the principle of individual national self-defence, and rejected any attempt by the US to integrate it into a collective self-defence arrangement. Japan’s policymakers were aware that the US, at the time of the negotiation of the security treaty and throughout the early 1950s, wanted to create a regional- wide multilateral collective self-defence network, modelled along the lines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and designed to complement the creation of the now defunct Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Such a network would have obliged Japan to provide military assistance to the US and other US-aligned states in the event of a conflict. Japanese policymakers were also aware of US expectations that, at the very least, Japan might be persuaded to provide bilateral military assistance for the defence of US forces and territory. Japanese awareness of the risks of entrapment and resistance to them were manifested in the final language of the 1951 treaty, in which the ‘mutuality’ and collective self-defence provisions of bilateral security treaties concluded by the US with other East Asian states in the early Cold War period were notably absent. Moreover, Yoshida further limited the scope of Japanese security commitments to the US by minimising Japan’s available military capabilities, frustrating US expectations by steadfastly refusing to develop the type of expeditionary and ground forces that could be used to support US forward deployed forces and US-led coalitions in conflicts in East Asia. Instead, Japan focused upon the gradual buildup of more balanced land, sea and air forces, and indigenous defence production capabilities. These would ensure not only economic recovery, but also that Japan would retain a degree of potential autonomy in security affairs from the US in the future.

Hence, it can be seen that Yoshida’s commitment of Japan to the bilateral security treaty with the US did not involve, at this time, any sense of functioning as a true US ally on a par with other treaty partners, Japan was aligned with the US because it was incorporated broadly into the US-led military and capitalist sphere in East Asia, and was the recipient of one-way US security guarantees for its own territory. But Japan did not perceive itself to be strictly allied with the US because it was not prepared to make any kind of active contribution to defend the US, or to support US strategy in the region, and deliberately limited itself to the passive role of the provision of military bases. As will be seen in later sections, Japan’s leaders refused to equate the bilateral security treaty with an alliance relationship until the 1980s. Japan’s eventual willingness to move from the principle of passive alignment under the Yoshida doctrine to that of an active alliance relationship in later years is, in many ways, the key to understanding the changing trajectory of Japan’s military policy.

Cold War adjustments

Japan’s basic security strategy trajectory, set by the Yoshida doctrine and underpinned by the strategic bargain with the US, went largely unchanged for much of the early Cold War period, although it underwent a series of adjustments to take account of the fluctuating international security environment and domestic Japanese politics. Prime Ministers Hatoyama Ichiro and Nobusuke Kishi made the first minor adjustments in their negotiations leading up the 1960 revision of the bilateral security treaty. Both sought to remove unequal provisions in the security treaty (relating to the US right to use its forces in Japan to suppress domestic unrest, and the absence of an explicit security guarantee by the US to defend Japan) by offering to inject a greater degree of mutuality into the security treaty. The negotiations for the revised 1960 Treaty of Mutual Security and Cooperation between the US and Japan set out more clearly, although not unequivocally, the security responsibilities of Japan and the US with regard to each other under the treaty. Article 5 of the treaty provided the first explicit security guarantee by stating that any attack on the territory of Japan was recognised as an attack on both treaty partners. Article 6 pledged that, in order to contribute to its own security, Japan would supply bases to the US for the maintenance of security in the Far East.

Nevertheless, in seeking to revise the treaty, Japan’s policymakers continued to pursue options to limit their military commitments to the US and to hedge against entrapment. Japan again made clear, in the course of revision negotiations, that the security treaty was based on the principle of individual national rather than collective self-defence and that Japan would not dispatch troops outside its own territory in support of the US. Japan also succeeded, via Article 4 of the revised treaty and in the exchange of notes that took place afterwards between Prime Minister Kishi and US Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, in negotiating a new US pledge to consult on the implementation of the treaty provisions, on major changes to the deployment of US forces in Japan, and on US combat operations from bases in Japan (apart from those conducted under Article 5 of the treaty). Ever since Japanese policymakers have argued that this provides the Japanese government a final veto over the US introduction of nuclear weapons and the staging of US military operations from Japan. In reality, Japan has turned a blind eye to the passage of nuclear weapons into Japanese ports and has refrained from exercising this veto, for fear of alienating the US. But for Japanese policymakers, the right to refuse cooperation under the security treaty served as one latent means by which to rein in US military operations from Japan if they are seen to impose too great a security cost. Furthermore, Japanese policymakers were able to gain US assent to drop plans for the geographical scope of Article 6 of the treaty to be designated as the ‘Asia-Pacific’, and to accept the less extensive designation of the Tar East’ as in the original treaty. In Diet interpellations in February 1960, Prime Minister Kishi limited the scope of US-Japan security cooperation by stating that, while the Tar East’ was not necessarily a clearly designated geographical region to which the treaty could be restricted, it broadly included the areas north of the Philippines and surrounding Japan (‘Nihon no shuhen’), and the areas under the control of South Korea and Taiwan.

The next moves for the adjustment of Japan’s security trajectory and the US-Japan strategic bargain emerged from the US side, spurred by the intensification of Cold War struggles in the 1960s. The US’s involvement in the Vietnam War made clear the limitations of its military power and increasingly forced the US to look towards aligned states to shore up its security strategy in East Asia. As the war escalated in the mid-1960s, Prime Ministers Hayato Ikeda and Eisaku Sato were determined that Japan should resist any suggestion that it might follow the US allies South Korea and Australia in dispatching troops to Vietnam to assist the war effort. Instead, Japan’s support was limited to the provision of economic aid to South Vietnam and permitting the US to use its bases in Japan to support the war. President Richard Nixon’s eventual decision to withdraw from Vietnam and the announcement of the ‘Guam Doctrine’ of July 1969 signalled the scaling-back of US military commitments in East Asia and enhanced US expectations for treaty partners to undertake responsibility for their own and regional security. This presented further potential US security demands upon Japan. As part of the wider US design to push aligned states towards expanded defence commitments, Japan was obliged to acknowledge, in the Sato-Nixon joint communiqué of November 1969, that South Korea and Taiwan were respectively ‘essential’ and ‘important’ factors for Japanese security. Japanese policymakers were fearful of the risks of entrapment involved in drawing this security linkage, but they acquiesced to maintain the US security presence in the region, and as part of the price for the US to agree to the final reversion of Okinawa to Japanese administration in 1972. Moreover, the risks of entrapment were minimised by Japan’s ensuring that, in the communiqué and thereafter, it did not provide the US with an explicit pledge to participate directly in a regional security arrangement.

Japan’s security strategy and relationship with the US underwent further significant adjustments in the later stages of the Cold War. During the early 1970s, the United States’ pursuit of détente with the USSR and rapprochement with China meant that the possibility of Japan being embroiled in a regional conflict was lessened, and created opportunities for Japan to pursue its diplomatic and economic engagement policies vis-à-vis China. Japan’s principal fears in this period were, firstly, that bilateral economic frictions, which were becoming more pronounced in the wake of the Japanese economic miracle, would lead to its abandonment by the US as a security partner; and, secondly; the continuing apparent limits of the US to maintain its military hegemony in the region following withdrawal from Vietnam. Japan moved to hedge against abandonment by formulating the NDPO in 1976. The NDPO was the first attempt by Japan to set out the principles of its defence policy alongside the military force structure necessary to achieve them. It was notable in emphasising not only a qualitative build-up of Japan’s national military capabilities as an implicit demonstration of efforts to relieve the defensive burdens of the US, but also in its explicit stress that Japan would maintain forces sufficient to defend itself in the first instance from direct aggression, and that if this proved impossible, Japan would seek US support. Thus, Japan was beginning to develop a military doctrine premised upon the closer coordination of Japanese and US forces.

The emergence of the US–Japan ‘alliance’

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the enhanced common threat of the USSR forced a convergence of Japanese and US strategic interests. Japan found itself threatened to a more direct and greater degree by the Soviet military build-up in East Asia. As a result, Japanese and US Cold War strategic interests overlapped more clearly, and Japanese policymakers’ fears of needless entrapment in a military conflict were lessened. Japan and the US discovered, for the first time, a division of labour for military cooperation under the security treaty. Japan, in line with the principle of individual self-defence, expanded its national military capabilities to assist the US in fulfilling its obligations to defend Japan under Article 5 of the security treaty. This military build-up, although predicated only on the basis of Japan’s own individual self-defence, was encouraged by the US, which viewed it as a solid defensive platform from which to project power under Article 6 of the treaty. The GSDF acquired larger numbers of main battle tanks (MBT) and shifted the weight of its deployments to Hokkaido to counter Soviet power in the north. The Air Self Defence Force (ASDF)’s purchase of E-2C early-warning aircraft and F-15 fighters was justified by the need to defend Japanese airspace against Soviet T-26 Backfire bombers, but these were also clearly intended, in the event of a conflict, to defend US bases in Japan from Soviet air- strikes and to release US military units from their defensive responsibilities to concentrate on possible combat roles outside Japanese territory. Similarly, the Maritime Self Defence Force (MSDF) procured large numbers of destroyers, minesweepers and P-3C aircraft to assist in Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) to provide a defensive shield for the US Navy operating out of Japan.

Japan and the US embarked on the first steps towards the direct coordination of their respective military roles through the formulation of the 1978 Guidelines of Japan-US Defence Cooperation. The Guidelines outlined areas for bilateral cooperation relating to Japan’s immediate defence under Article 5 of the security treaty (including tactical planning, joint exercises and logistical support), and for cooperation in regional contingencies in the Far East under Article 6 (including patrolling the Sea Lines of Communication [SLOC]). The fact that Japan’s defence efforts were mainly concentrated around Japan itself, and that US military activities, even outside Japanese territory, were clearly seen to contribute to Japan’s own security by countering the common Soviet threat, meant that the issue of collective self-defence as a basis for bilateral cooperation was not seriously raised. Subsequently, enhanced bilateral cooperation reinforced Japanese perceptions of the overall utility of the security treaty to the point that, in 1981, Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki was first able to refer publicly to this relationship as an ‘alliance’.

Despite the increased willingness of Japanese policymakers to convert the security treaty into a bilateral alliance, they continued to hedge against entrapment in US military strategy. Japan maintained its latent veto on the US use of bases, the limitations on the geographical scope of the security treaty and the predication of its support for the US on the principle of individual national self-defence rather than collective self-defence. Japan’s policymakers also ensured that, even though the JSDF’s built-up capabilities were increasingly complementary with those of the US, and increasingly skewed to the point that Japan lacked balanced forces to defend itself independently of the US, these capabilities remained fundamen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Glossary
• Tables and Charts
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Japan’s post-war security trajectory and policy system
• Chapter 2. Japan’s shifting security trajectory and policy system
• Chapter 3. Japan’s national security policy and capabilities
• Chapter 4. Forging a strengthened US–Japan alliance
• Chapter 5. Japan, regional cooperation, multilateral security and the ‘war on terror’
• Conclusion
• Notes