'Militarist' Japan becomes Washington's front line in East Asia

By the time Japan announced that its defence budget would reach the NATO benchmark of 2 per cent of GDP, the fiction of postwar pacifism had already collapsed.

What remains is the shell of Article 9, which is still inked into the constitution but is being steadily hollowed out by reinterpretation, legal manoeuvres and geopolitical pressure.

Analysts have warned that behind Tokyo’s carefully maintained image as a peace state, one of Asia’s most technologically advanced militaries has been reconstructed, not in defiance of the postwar order, but in service of it.

The transformation was incubated during the US occupation and subsequently institutionalised through Cold War strategic doctrine that demanded Japan “take responsibility” for its own security but, ironically, only within Washington’s regional security architecture.

While the Peace Clause endured in textual form, the Japan Self-Defence Forces steadily acquired the operational characteristics of a conventional military. The inflection point arrived in 2014, when former prime minister Shinzo Abe reinterpreted the constitution to authorise collective self-defence in a legal manoeuvre consummating a long-standing strategic convergence with the United States.

Successive administrations have chipped away further by lifting arms-export bans, widening operational limits and explicitly invoking “external threats” to normalise war readiness.

By 2025, defence spending reached the 2 per cent threshold, culminating a decade-long upward trajectory. 

As a result, Japan now deploys Aegis destroyers, F-35 fighter aircraft, amphibious units and long-range “counterstrike” missile systems. Within US strategic discourse, Tokyo is no longer framed as a passive ally but as an “indispensable” forward partner in East Asia’s evolving balance of power.

Similarly, former prime minister Fumio Kishida’s 2022 security strategy called for a 60 per cent rise in defence spending by 2027, explicitly tying Japan’s military build-up to alliance objectives. The new guidelines committed Japan to “deter and respond to any attempt to change the status quo by force, in cooperation with ally countries”. 

Public opinion has followed suit. A recent survey found that 68 per cent of Japanese now identify China’s military as the primary threat, while a record 45.2 per cent support expanding the Self-Defence Forces. 

Similarly, legal changes mirror this mood as a 2016 security bill defined a US–China war over Taiwan as equivalent to an attack on Japan itself. 

Under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, this interpretation has been stated openly and more aggressively. She has declared that a Chinese move on Taiwan would be a “survival-threatening” crisis, echoing Abe’s earlier formulation that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency”.

Taiwan and the frozen peace

Nowhere is the meaning of Japan’s militarist turn clearer than in the Taiwan question. Under the Cairo and Potsdam declarations of 1943 and 1945, Japan was obliged to relinquish Taiwan and all seized territories to China. However, Tokyo is increasingly treating Taiwan as a strategic red line of its own.

Asia’s security architecture, rooted in the Cold War era, is built around the so-called “hub and spokes” system— a network of bilateral alliances linking the United States, as the central hub, to five regional partners: Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand. 

While this US-centred framework remains a cornerstone of regional security, it has increasingly been supplemented by growing “spoke-to-spoke” cooperation among Washington’s allies themselves.

Against this backdrop, Tokyo’s defence buildup is fitting squarely into Washington’s Cold War–era “hub-and-spokes” architecture in Asia, with Japan once again acting as the eastern “spoke” of a containment strategy against China.

Takaichi became the first Japanese leader to explicitly frame a Taiwan conflict as an existential threat to Japan. In parallel, Tokyo has fortified its southwestern frontier: radar and missile batteries have been deployed on Yonaguni — just 110 kilometres from Taiwan — while joint US–Japan exercises and forward basing plans are being expanded across the Ryukyu island chain.

Analysts argue that Japan now functions as the eastern pillar of US containment in Asia, helping enforce a frozen postwar order that keeps China’s reunification indefinitely on hold.

They say Tokyo’s rearmament, framed as “normalisation”, is in fact the muscle of a Cold War system that never truly ended.