A Little More Money, A Lot More Problems: Japan's Defense Dilemma

Ted Galen Carpenter

Security, Asia

Tokyo is trying to play a much more assertive regional strategic role without developing the necessary military wherewithal to back it up in the event of a crisis.

Recent news accounts announce with great fanfare that Japan’s Ministry of Defense is asking for a boost in spending, primarily to fortify the country’s outlying island chain in the East China Sea that is the focus of a bitter territorial dispute with China. The budgetary request confirms that Tokyo has no intention of compromising regarding the feud over those Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

But the fine print in the news stories also suggests that Japan isn’t very serious about creating a more robust military capability to enforce its territorial claims. The requested increase is a mere 2.2 percent, and it would bring Tokyo’s annual military outlays up to $42.38 billion. That is less than one-third of China’s official defense budget of $145 billion—which almost no one believes fully accounts for that country’s actual military spending. Both the Pentagon and independent estimates place the real figure at $180 billion or more.

This underscores a dangerous disconnect between Tokyo’s increasingly strident geostrategic ambitions and its military capabilities. Not only has Japan taken a hard line on the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has moved to “reinterpret” article nine of the country’s pacifist-leaning constitution to permit Japanese involvement in collective defense efforts. The reinterpretation also broadens the definition of what constitutes a threat to Japan’s security. It would no longer be confined to an attack on Japanese territory.