Japan’s Military Buildup Faces Resistance

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

TOM LE: Even though polling data in Japan shows younger Japanese are more aware of external threats, the polling data has not shown at all that people are willing to enlist in the military to deal with those threats or pay more taxes.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Over the weekend, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hosted the Group of Seven—also known as the G7—Summit in Japan. Over the years, these formal meetings between the leaders of the world's wealthiest democracies have become high-profile events for coordinating solutions to major global issues. Think international trade or climate change and, of course, matters of war.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: And what's also interesting about this year's summit is that it's being held in Hiroshima, a place which is deeply embedded in conversations about war and peace.

YUKI TATSUMI: Hiroshima, I guess, to many who have been working in the nuclear disarmament field is… the Hiroshima and other city, Nagasaki, will have a kind of a symbolic significance to this. Those two cities are really the only cities on earth that had the direct damage by having atomic bombs dropped on them. So, holding the summit in Hiroshima at the time where Russia has been using nuclear intimidation to countries in Europe—I think it also has a significance to that on its own.

HANNAH: That's Yuki Tatsumi, a senior fellow and co-director of the East Asia Program and director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. Yuki helped us understand why it's important to be focusing on Japan right now, not simply because it's Japan's turn to host the G7, but because Kishida is hosting the summit at a moment when Japan is reinventing its role on the global stage. And that's important for several reasons.

TATSUMI: Japan is really the cornerstone of a U.S.-Asia policy. I think it was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who says if the U.S. wants to get Asia right, it needs to get Japan right. And the former American ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, also said the U.S.-Japan relationship is the most important bilateral relationship, bar none. So, there are those words that kind of symbolize how the U.S. see this relationship. Japan obviously is a key diplomatic partner with the United States. But then, I think, increasingly in the last five years or so, Japan has become more and more of a connecting node for the U.S., for its own foreign policy toward different parts of the world.

HANNAH: America's security alliance with Japan, forged after World War II is as important as ever, especially with both countries’ goals for countering China's rise, which they and the rest of the G7 nations made abundantly clear over the weekend. And because the relationship is so important, Japan is attempting to redefine its role in matters of regional and global security. This is taking shape most clearly with Japan increasing its defense spending, a move very much welcomed by the United States. But this is where the story gets complicated. It's complicated because Japan has a constitution which basically outlaws Japan having a standing military. It's also complicated by Japan's anti-militaristic culture, which makes actually building that military very, very difficult.

LE: Because of Japan's demographics, they've never been able to fully recruit its quota for its Japan Self-Defense Force. Because the population is aging so rapidly, the tax base is also declining. So, you're not able to buy technology and things like that. And because Japan hasn't engaged in warfare for three quarters of a century, its companies have no battle data when it comes to weapons development.

HANNAH: That's Tom Le. He's a professor of politics at Pomona College, and he's the author of the book Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century.

LE: This is where you can see the Constructivists’ argument goes in where there's this material factor, and it cultivates this anti militarism culture, because if you don't have the bodies, you don't have the technology, and you don't have the money, it's really hard to cultivate militarism in the same way you see in other countries.

And one last thing I'd like to say is: unlike the other countries in East Asia who also suffer from demographics problems, declining aging populations, they drew very different lessons from World War II. South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, China—they felt that their weakness was why they were colonized and why they suffered immensely. So, all those countries practice conscription or have the ability to do so. Japan blamed the militarists. This is their way of almost absolving themselves about the things they did and saying, “Actually it was the militarists who hijacked the country and made the country pursue this dangerous path.” In Japan there is no conscription. So, you can see how the ideas are in Japan, and the culture is different than the rest of East Asia. And it plays out differently when it comes to the security.

HANNAH: Does Japan have the ability to actually burden-share with the United States and its allies in confronting challenges such as the rise of China? Will we start to see a more assertive Japan on the world stage in the coming years? Or is it wishful thinking that Japan can get there? Well, Tom has his own take.

Let's just talk for a minute about the security environment or the threats that Japan does face, to the extent it does face any. What are the things that are driving this deepening of investment in defense spending to the extent that's occurring? There's a lot of focus on U.S.-China rivalry. What does Japan perceive as the primary threats to its security?

LE: It faces several threats, but then how it can tackle it differs greatly. I think it has to have a multi-pronged policy. Broadly speaking, I believe the strategy now is the thing they introduced under Abe, which is the Indo-Pacific strategy. This is a rules-based order, having an international structure that's more conducive towards peace as opposed to having to militarily insure it every single time. If countries follow the rules, if trade goes well, then you're more likely to have development and peace. This is actually within line of how Japanese have understood peace since the end of World War II. Part of it is the traditional kind of stopping tanks and invasions, but also development, making sure there's not poverty and insecurity, which causes the former.

So, the threats Japan faces—I think the most obvious one would be North Korea and its nuclear program, because North Korea has said so, and that the West is encroaching on it, and that if its sovereignty is violated, then they are more than willing to use weapons. There's very little Japan can do to stop, say, a nuclear attack, short of getting nuclear weapons itself. So, for that, Japan could build up some basic deterrence abilities, to punish North Korea in a way that they would second guess—basically strengthen the U.S. alliance. That's what they need.

When it comes to China, it's a complex one, because Japan knows it has to trade with China. This idea of decoupling from China completely makes no sense in terms of economic opportunities. And you can't just ignore the second biggest economy in the most populous country in the world at your doorstep and just function as if they don't exist and make up the trade and relations. So, Japan has to, on one hand, maintain relations with China and also be mindful of its bilateral security threats and also its relationship with the United States. Here, Japan can improve its reconnaissance capabilities, its ability to patrol its small islands in the South China Sea, or the Senkaku Islands, disputed territories. It can invest in its air force, so it could scramble the planes and ward off Chinese planes and ships that are in its territory. It could pick up conventional deterrence capabilities just to increase the cost a little bit for China not to always enter its territories and cause trouble. But ultimately, there's really little Japan can do to go toe-to-toe with China. If Japan is doubling its defense budget. China's defense budget has increased five-, tenfold over the last 20 or 30 years. It's not even a comparison. So, that's the best thing they can do.

And lastly, I would say there's the threat of supply chains. When relations sour, China has a stranglehold on some important industries or resources or processing. And so, that increases the costs and economic vulnerability of Japan. So, that's something they probably want to build resilience in.

HANNAH: It does strike me that there is a kind of vulnerability or dependence you describe in which Japan relies existentially on the United States following through on its security commitments.

LE: I would say this is a problem for both countries. It goes both ways. There's always an entrapment and an abandonment issue. They are in a very strong alliance, and they have to support each other. But when you have that support which is ironclad, there's the moral hazard of being adventurous or taking on greater threat than it needs to. And at the same time, both sides have to reaffirm or reassure its ally that it'll show up because it doesn't want to be abandoned. So, for Japan, if you just completely remove the United States from the equation, its military is still very well-trained. It has a very impressive Navy, and it could defend itself from most countries around the world, except for a North Korean nuclear attack, because there's no defense against that, and a full scale Chinese invasion, which I would say is highly unlikely because the international reaction and the United States’ reaction to China would be huge. But Japan, especially under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and continuing with Prime Minister Kishida—there is strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance of more interoperability. Japan is very reliant on buying U.S. weapons because they don't produce their own. So, they are very dependent on, I would say, the functioning of its military as it is. It's definitely not decoupled, especially since they can't really make their own weapons.

HANNAH: You briefly alluded to the changing demography, the aging population of Japan, and how it's hard to support that—gender, taxation, and public opinion around that and infrastructure. Let's take a minute to talk about these aspects of your research right now. How does the research you're doing look at these kinds of dynamics and constraints that complicate these breezy narratives in the media about Japan's military buildup?

LE: The model is quite simple. Normally when you want to secure your state, you either have to have the bodies, like a military, to defend it, and if you lack that, then you need to have technology to make up the gap—weapons and things such as that.

Let's start with the bodies. Japan has the smallest military in East Asia, around 250,000, and they have to recruit around 11,000 people per year to replenish their ranks. It's an all-voluntary force because the constitution makes it so and because of the anti-militaristic culture. So, every year, they have never met a quota in recruitment because people don't want to join, because it is unlike, say, in the United States, where there's a history of supporting the military—somebody knows somebody in the military, family, friends—there's a culture here. You get a discount if you served in the military. You get to board a plane before everybody. All these general societal acknowledgments of the importance—those things don't exist in Japan. When students graduate from uni, they enter the private economy. There's no demand to join the military. There's a big middle class. There's not even economic impetus to join the military, say, like in the United States.

HANNAH: Yeah. You talk about the anti-militarism ecosystem that's baked in and pervasive throughout the country. Okay.

LE: And this ecosystem is maintained through the education system, through the lack of military experiences, because people just don't know people in the military as much. You don't talk about it. Colleges don't promote it. If you're a straight-A student and an engineer, your professor is not going to say, “Join Lockheed Martin. That's a good job.” They'll say, “Join Toyota,” or something like that.

And then also, I focus a lot about peace museums. Japan has more peace museums than anywhere in the world, and it's an important part of everyone's education. There's physical manifestations of anti-war sentiment. Same thing in the United States—how there's a big debate about Confederate statues because they're a reflection of society. Do you want them up or not? Those statues take up important places in society. In Japan, it would be the A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima—this structure in the middle of Hiroshima, which is where the atomic bomb dropped.

For other demographics, though, because it's an aging population, they need more babies, and people aren't having them. But in order to fix that, they have to fix work-life balance, gender equality, and basically create incentives for women to somehow work and have more children. And so, everyone talks about a doubling of the defense budget. Prime Minister Kishida wants to double the family support budget. And so, that's a harder thing to social engineer, and I don't really think they have a solution to getting more bodies.

And then when it comes to technology, since they haven't developed their own weapons as much as other countries in the last 70 years, it's very cost ineffective, and they're forced to buy weapons from other countries, which is where you pay a premium.

So, Japan is stuck in both ways, in which it can't get the bodies, and it can't get the technology. And it's a country with incredible debt and economic stagnation. So, I see the country as bound. The ecosystem constrains it from physically changing.

HANNAH: Let's talk about that. I think this is all part of culture—the fact that they're trying to increase the family support budget, the fact that there are these peace museums. What other kind of aspects of culture did you want to address?

LE: I think that's important. The physical things, the material world, informs our culture, and our culture helps us interpret the physical world. It's just this back and forth between the two. Japan has an anti-militaristic culture when it comes to security. When I interviewed Japanese policymakers, like defense officials, ministers of defense, even, they know the limits of what they can ask for. So, for instance, if they're a major war, they're not going to just say, “All right, let's do conscription.” It's not even on the board. Their policy options are limited because they know what the country is willing to accept. It took a long time for Prime Minister Kishida to try to get to this two percent. Why not three percent or four percent? They need to try to catch up with China because they know it's economically not feasible, and even though polling data in Japan shows younger Japanese are more aware of external threats, the polling data has not shown at all that people are willing to enlist in the military to deal with those threats or pay more taxes. Politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible is very dependent on the culture of anti-militarism, where a lot of Japanese grow up in school learning that war led to catastrophe, that it led to the atomic bombs, that the people suffered because of this gross militarism during the war. So, they're very cautious about that. I think there's a real debate on how big of a threat China is. Are they an absolute threat, or is there a way to cooperate with them? And I think Japan's interested in finding an off ramp.

HANNAH: Yeah. Can you talk more about that? Do they like being caught in the middle of a major geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China? Do they buy the narrative, essentially, that war with China is inevitable or that it's trying to upend the rules-based international order rather than just kind of tweak it to suit its interests more?

LE: I think for that question, not just in Japan, but for every country, mostly you could say they're not too happy being caught between a major power struggle with the United States and China. No one enjoys that. I would say, though, for the Japanese policymakers—and this is different than the public—they've been trying to get the United States to follow them in saying, “Hey, China is growing pretty quickly now, U.S. We should probably take this more seriously. We'd like you to pivot to Asia. Put more resources here.” At the same time, they want the U.S. there to reassure them, but they're not interested in having enough stones to tip the scales to lead to a war. They want to maintain the status quo. Status quo is always good because status quo is not war. Everybody knows how it works. And so, that's what these U.S. allies want. They want the U.S. to be there, but they do not want the U.S. to be saber rattling to trigger the other side to behave irrationally.

HANNAH: Yeah, they want the benefits of the security blanket without the costs of unnecessary provocation, which is a tricky line to walk, right?

LE: Yeah, it is. And that's international security in a nutshell, right? We all want to work with each other, but we don't know the full intentions of the other side. So, you trust but verify in some ways. This is where I think the realists are right, that by structure, there are opportunities for insecurity. However, I think they underplay how much countries go out of their way to try to avoid it. Very few countries have the capabilities or interest to kind of fix things with a hammer. Japan is well aware that it's not going to win a war with China, so they should be avoiding that at all cost. This discussion has always been a defensive war. This capability is all for defense. So, when we say Japan is militarizing, my book talks about what kind of militarism. We have to talk about different types of militarism. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had a very specific type of militarism. They spent a lot on the military. There was conscription. There were all these elements. During World War II, the United States conscripted folks and spent a lot in the military. But we would never say those two kind of militarism were the same, based on values and purpose. So, when we see these headlines that Japan is militarizing, and they're doubling defense budget, I think a reasonable person would just ask, “What does this actually mean?” when most of the money goes into salaries instead of weapons.

HANNAH: There's a lot of talk about democracies versus autocracies. Japan is a poster child for the successful market-based economy with a strong democracy. But where are those points of division in the idea-scape of Japan relative to the United States? We talk about Japan sharing our values, but it has its own value set that's been forged over millennia. What are Japan's values when it comes to international politics, and how do they depart from America's?

LE: I think there's far more overlap than divergences. It's because U.S. foreign policy is also very diverse. I've been focusing a lot on the military because that's a U.S. strength. But the U.S. also has an incredibly strong State Department, or a prestigious one with a long history of doing a lot of good work. And I think a lot of countries model their foreign policy or their State Departments or Ministry of Foreign Affairs after that. So, I think the countries are very similar in support for free trade, for democracy.

When it comes to the cultural differences, this is where you get into sociological, anthropological things that I think are more important domestically. We could talk about collectivism and all these stereotypes that I think have some truth to it, but I don't think that matters so much internationally. I think where they differ is Japan spends more of its resources on building resilience in the world against natural disasters, fighting poverty—all of these things that I would say is not against what the U.S. does. The U.S. does that as well as the traditional military stuff, because the U.S. is so blessed in resources and soft power and strong alliances that the U.S. can, whereas Japan knows its limits. They don't have the resources or the same kind of pull, so it doesn't spend as much on the traditional security things. It has to cobble together alliances or agreements and things like that. But they're never going to win the global war through brute force. And I think in the U.S., that's always in the U.S.'s back pocket, that when push comes to shove, it can do it, whereas Japan knows it can't. So, it focuses on all the other possibilities to try to secure the world. So its values are different. It's really a matter of where the emphasis is.

HANNAH: You mentioned one thing why Hiroshima was a significant symbolic meeting point for this meeting. But what are the major stories that are kind of getting ignored?

LE: Germane to what we've been speaking to is that G7 is going to come and go, and we’re going to get some statements. All the lower-level folks in each government has a lot of work to do to try to get these initiatives going. And then domestic politics continue.

So, for President Biden, he's going to leave; he has to go back because he has a debt ceiling debate which can have huge economic ramifications for the world, for Japan, for everybody, because this could affect debt and everything like that. And then he has an election coming up. So, my expectation is President Biden's going to be much more domestic-focused as he's going to try to get reelected. And then we have all these issues there.

Prime Minister Kishida is not going to increase that defense budget until they call an election in his country, too. It's almost like a public referendum on, “Do you support this?” There's no guarantee that he will win. His popularity rate is well below fifty percent, and the public doesn't vote for him. It's the party. But then if the party does really poorly—which they might do well because the opposition parties are pretty weak—this could be another signal to Kishida that this might not work, or I might have to re-change my messaging.

We can look at this with Prime Minister Abe. He tried to amend the constitution for most of his time, and he just couldn't. He tried to amend the constitution to more formally recognize the Self-Defense Force and to give it more freedom to act. And they simply couldn't. They couldn't get rid of Article Nine, the war renunciation clause, and things such as that. The current discussions in Japan among realists, the media, they conveniently have ignored that. That's not even on the table anymore.

So, like I said, the environment is conducive to certain things. The politicians realize they can't go that far. So, now, how about we double the defense budget? And then when the next election comes up, or as they try to make this happen, we'll see if it's very possible. And then it comes to the final check, which is where I put so much attention to, which is demographics and taxation. Now you know you want to double it. Now find the money. The public doesn't want to pay the taxes on it. Japan has the worst debt out of all OECD countries. The government could just issue more bonds. But the current bank doesn't really want to do that for this. And so, they have to scrap together the budget to pay for it. And I think it's going to be very hard. So, sure, there are reasons that may suggest Japan should have a more assertive military, but it's much easier said than done.

HANNAH: Given Japan's inherent challenges with building up its defense forces, such as a rapidly aging population, an anti-militaristic culture, and financial and technological constraints, can Japan be the leader on security challenges that it wants to be, and that the U.S. wants it to be? And what does this mean for the U.S.-Japan relationship moving forward?

I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to thank Yuki Tatsumi and Tom Le for joining me. Thanks also to our None of the Above team. Our producer is Caroline Gray. Our associate producer and editor is Sarah Leeson. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. See you next time.

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