BY EVA CHENG
At US$45.6 billion, Japan's military budget was dwarfed only by the military budget of the United States which totalled $396.1 billion for fiscal 2003. Throughout the 1990s, Japan's war budget was the second largest in the world a fact not widely known due in no small part to Tokyo's and Washington's successful propaganda that Japan is a "pacifist" nation.
This deception is furthered by Tokyo's formal designation of regular army, marine, air and paramilitary forces, with their massive arsenals of state-of-the-art weaponry, as seemingly harmless "self-defence" force. It is reinforced by the no-war, non- offensive capability clause Article 9 in Japan's post-1945 constitution.
The Japanese navy has 44,000 personnel, 18 submarines and 50 destroyers, including four Aegis-class guided-missile destroyers, plus 80 combat aircraft and some 80 armed helicopters. The May 8, 2000, Korea Times observed: "Only two other nations, the US and Spain, are equipped with the Aegis, the most advanced destroyer, capable of attacking 16 to 18 aerial targets simultaneously."
The Japanese air force has 46,000 personnel and around 360 combat aircraft (including 203 F-15 fighter-bombers). The Japanese army has 160,000 soldiers, plus 45,000 reserve troops. It is equipped with 1070 tanks, a similar number of artillery guns and about 90 attack helicopters.
Japan is now engaging in a multi-billion-dollar anti-ballistic missile "research" project with Washington the Theatre Missile Defence system.
Another commonly overlooked fact about Japan's capability to wage war is its huge stockpile of plutonium, which, according to Greenpeace, last year totalled 38,000 kilograms. Tokyo claims this stockpile is unsuitable for use in nuclear weapons. Washington finds this excuse perfectly acceptable in the case of Japan, but not for North Korea, which has a much smaller amount of nuclear power plant-generated plutonium.
In a public address given April 2002 in Japan, Ichiro Ozawa, leader of the opposition Jiyuto (Liberal Party) and former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, declared "it would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads we have plutonium at nuclear power plants, enough to make several thousand such warheads".
A month later, deputy chief cabinet secretary Shinzo Abe even asserted that the possession of nuclear weapons wasn't in contradiction with Japan's constitution. That same month, chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda further tested the water by declaring that "if international tension intensified, some citizens might even argue that Japan should possess nuclear weapons".
A few weeks before Abe's and Fukuda's statements, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government submitted to the Diet, Japan's parliament, a package of War Contingency Bills, which would give the Japanese military forces more latitude to engage in combat when stationed abroad. The bills were subsequently passed.
Not only did Washington not raise objections to this, it encouraged it. US President George Bush rained praise upon Koizumi's government when it sent Japanese military units to perform "non-combat" roles alongside the US military during Washington's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. This included transportation of fuel and ammunition.
US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz and deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage outlined their expectation of Japan's military role in an October 2000 Institute for National Strategic Studies report on 'The United States and Japan: Advancing Toward a Mature Relationship":
"[Washington] welcomes a Japan that is willing to make a greater [military] contribution and to become a more equal [military] alliance partners", the report makes clear. It refers to the military alliance that Washington has struck with Tokyo since 1951 (at the height of the 1950-53 Korean War), which has renewed and expanded several times since. The alliance was strengthened in 1997 in the form of revised Guidelines for US-Japan Defense Cooperation.
"[The revised guidelines] should be regarded as the floor not the ceiling for an expanded Japanese role in the transpacific alliance".
The report urged Japan to take a full part in "peacekeeping" operations and called on Tokyo "to remove its 1992 self-imposed restraints", referring to Tokyo's reluctance to commit its military forces to foreign combat operations.
Since then, those "restraints" have been substantially undermined, thanks to the Tokyo's support for the Bush regime's War on Terror. Japan's Defence Agency the administrative organisation responsible for the management and operation of the Japanese military forces described Japan's involvement in the 2001 Afghan war as being "the first time ever since the end of World War II for the SDF [Self Defence Force] to be dispatched overseas in connection with hostilities".
That expanded involvement was made possible only with anti-terrorism laws which were rushed through Japan's parliament just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the US. Among other new powers, the laws allow Japanese troops to support aggressive military action, including those not sanctioned by the UN; to take part in more quasi-combat "logistical support" roles; and use weapons not only to defend themselves, but also those military forces they are assisting. The US bases in Japan which host 47,000 US troops are there supposedly to protect Japan, but the anti-terrorism laws authorise Japanese troops to protect these "protectors".
An urgent appeal by a group of Japanese constitutional scholars on October 9, 2001, teased out some of the new laws' dangers. The laws were billed as necessary to conduct "cooperation and support activities" such as supply, repairs, servicing, medical care and the transport of weapons, ammunition and personnel. The statement warned that "assuming that the use of force is impossible without such help, this support is an essential part of military action, and is therefore clearly participation in war".
The laws are due to expire this October, but can be extended for two more years.
As in the US, the struggle against terrorism was seized upon by the Japanese ruling class as a cover to kick start its long-cherished but inhibited agenda of using its military forces to protect its overseas economic interests. For Washington, the War on Terror has enabled it to push forward its agenda of having Tokyo begin to play a support role in its drive to crush Third World opposition to imperialist domination.
Article 9 of Japan's constitution has been a major obstacle to this agenda. George Bush senior's administration, which led the 1991 imperialist assault on Iraq, was particularly frustrated when this clause blocked Japan from sending troops to back up US forces in that war.
This barrier to Tokyo making "personnel contributions" to US-led military operations was overcome in June 1992 by the enactment of the International Peace Cooperation Law. Since then, Japan's "peacekeepers" have been sent on missions to Cambodia, Namibia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Afghanistan, East Timor, Indonesia and Guam.
Apart from stationing two fast combat support ships and three destroyers in the Indian Ocean since the end of last year, the Japanese navy has helped the Thai military to transport heavy war-related equipment to the Indian Ocean.
Dr Yoichiro Sato of Hawaii's Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies believes this move is aimed at setting "a political precedent in transporting the troops of an Asian country". He sees it as part of a broader effort to set more precedents "with the US, Britain, other European allies, and Thailand in the war on terrorism, [which] will pave the way for an expanded Japanese role in regional security cooperation" in reality, policing Asia for imperialist interests.
From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.
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