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The American news media have barely noticed, given their (justly) vast coverage of the war in Ukraine, but other hot spots are also brewing in east Asia. In the last month, Japan has taken a huge step away from its anti-military tradition, doubling its defense budget and asking the U.S. for long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, while South Korea’s president has talked about building nuclear weapons.
These moves have been motivated by a growing belligerence on the part of China and North Korea, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been the main driving force. Long-standing but furtive hawkish rumblings in Tokyo and Seoul have begun to morph into bold statements and active policy.
“The war in Ukraine is framing all of this,” said Daniel Sneider, lecturer in Asia studies at Stanford University, who is currently doing research and reporting in Japan. “The idea that the aggressive use of force can still happen—and could happen here—has turned people’s heads.”
The effect has galvanized not just elite attention but the popular mood. Japanese TV news, which often pays little attention to the rest of the world, has recently been dwelling for hours on the war in Ukraine. Russia’s stepped-up naval exercises off Japan’s coast, along with its continuing dispute over the Kuril Islands in the northern Pacific, have intensified the nervousness. “No one thinks Russia is going to invade Japan, but there’s a growing sense of threat,” Sneider said, “the notion of a ‘turning point’”—the same phrase that Germany has used since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—“that has allowed the government to do things that they had been moving toward, and to do so more rapidly.”
In December, the Japanese government released an official National Security Strategy, its first such document in a decade. It also doubled its defense budget, from 1 percent of GDP to 2 percent, and asked the U.S. to supply nearly $50 billion worth of cruise missiles with the range to hit targets in China and North Korea (these would be Japan’s first “counter-strike” weapons). Japan has also approved an American plan to transform a unit of U.S. Marines in Okinawa into a “littoral regiment,” capable of mounting offensives along the region’s islands and coastlines.
Together, this amounts to a very big deal. Only in 2014 did Japan “reinterpret” Article 9 of its constitution, which banned war under whatever circumstances, to allow its military to help defend allies. (The constitution was written in 1947 in the wake of Imperial Japan’s surrender and the reinvention of the country, under the victorious Allies’ purview, as a democracy.) Though the military—called the Self-Defense Forces—is large, with 250,000 active-duty personnel, it has never fired a shot in anger since 1945. Nor does it export weapons (though it has recently supplied Ukraine with items like mine-detectors)…
