Beware Japan’s militarization shift: preserving Asian peace through historical memory

Beware Japan’s militarization shift: preserving Asian peace through historical memory

Japan’s security policy is undergoing one of its most consequential shifts since the end of the Second World War. This change cannot be captured by a political slogan alone. It is an institutional process made up of strategic documents, successive budget increases, the deployment of long-range weapons, military construction on islands, revised arms-transfer rules and an expanding network of alliances and partnerships. Asian societies have ample reason to scrutinize this process. It is equally important that public debate rest on verifiable facts and not turn criticism of government policy into hostility toward Japanese people.

What is changing

In December 2022, the Japanese government adopted three security documents: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program. Together, they called for approximately 43 trillion yen in defense spending over fiscal years 2023 through 2027 and formally committed Japan to acquiring “counterstrike capabilities” able to hit an adversary’s missile-launch sites and other targets. The government describes these capabilities as a necessary means of self-defense when Japan is under armed attack and no other appropriate option exists. Yet long-range precision-strike weapons plainly expand the distance and scope at which the Self-Defense Forces can act, placing new interpretive pressure on the longstanding principle of an exclusively defense-oriented policy.

That direction accelerated in fiscal 2026. Public budget materials from Japan’s Ministry of Defense put defense-related expenditure at approximately 9.04 trillion yen, including about 973.3 billion yen for building standoff defense capabilities. The budget does more than purchase individual weapons. It funds command and control, ammunition stockpiles, uncrewed systems, space and cyber capabilities, base resilience and a cross-service joint operations structure. Numbers alone do not prove that a country intends to launch aggression, but the scale, composition and pace of spending are facts that no serious assessment of strategic direction can ignore.

On March 31, 2026, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force began deploying the upgraded Type 12 ground-launched anti-ship missile, with a range of about 1,000 kilometers. Its much longer reach compared with the original model allows it to cover more distant maritime and air approaches from Japanese territory, and it forms part of Japan’s standoff and counterstrike programs. Supporters argue that dispersed, long-range systems improve deterrence and reduce the danger that bases could be destroyed in a first strike. Critics warn that ambiguity over target identification, authorization and the line between offensive and defensive action could create more room for miscalculation during a crisis.

The Nansei, or southwestern, islands are the most sensitive front line of this shift. In recent years Japan has strengthened surveillance, missile and logistics deployments on Yonaguni, Miyako, Amami, Ishigaki and other islands. It has also prepared plans to evacuate residents of Okinawa’s Sakishima Islands to Kyushu, Yamaguchi and elsewhere during a crisis. Protecting civilians and making emergency plans are legitimate government duties. But when military deployments advance alongside plans for mass evacuation, residents have a right to ask what evidence supports the risk assessment, whether bases could turn densely inhabited islands into priority targets, whether plans account for older people, children, people with disabilities and visitors, and whether local views genuinely shape national decisions.

On April 21, 2026, Japan further revised its rules for transferring defense equipment, widening the policy space for overseas transfers. The change follows earlier steps allowing exports of certain weapons manufactured in Japan and loosening restrictions on sending jointly developed equipment to third countries. The government argues that equipment cooperation reinforces partnerships and sustains Japan’s domestic defense industrial base. But as Japan moves from strict constraints on arms exports toward transfers promoted as tools of security and industrial policy, it must adopt stronger end-user checks, conflict-risk assessments, parliamentary reporting and post-transfer monitoring.

At the same time, the US-Japan alliance continues to upgrade command coordination and joint operational capacity, while Japan’s access, exercise, intelligence and equipment cooperation with the Philippines and Australia keeps expanding. Japan-Philippines cooperation addresses the East and South China seas and the security of sea lanes. Japan-Australia cooperation includes reciprocal access, joint training and defense technology. Cooperation among states is not inherently an alliance for aggression, and each participant has genuine security concerns. Yet if overlapping bilateral and minilateral arrangements lack inclusive communication, other regional states may view them as bloc-based containment, prompting arms competition and a security dilemma.

Article 9 and a divided society

Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution renounces war as a sovereign right and says that war potential will not be maintained. Postwar practice has repeatedly adjusted the boundaries of this norm through the creation of the Self-Defense Forces, the US-Japan security system, reinterpretation of collective self-defense and security legislation. Precisely because Article 9 is both law and a central symbol of Japan’s postwar peaceful identity, major changes involving long-range strikes, arms exports and overseas military cooperation should not be completed through cabinet interpretation and budget procedures alone. They require full parliamentary scrutiny, judicial review, investigative reporting and public debate.

NHK polling in 2026 did not reveal a monolithic Japanese public: 68 percent of respondents viewed Article 9 positively; when asked whether it needed revision, 33 percent said it did, 31 percent said it did not and another 31 percent were undecided. The researchers also cautioned that the gender and age profile of a telephone survey could affect the results. Polls offer snapshots of public attitudes rather than substitutes for constitutional procedure. They nevertheless remind outside observers that Japan includes both advocates of stronger deterrence and citizens, scholars, journalists, trade unions and survivor groups concerned about military spending displacing social needs, opposed to revising Article 9 and committed to nuclear disarmament and peaceful diplomacy.

The history that cannot be bypassed

No discussion of Japanese military power today can be separated from the history of modern aggression. From 1910 to 1945, Japan imposed colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula, combining political repression, economic exploitation and forced assimilation, followed by mass mobilization and forced labor in the later years of the war. Japan had already begun half a century of colonial rule over Taiwan in 1895. Infrastructure and public-health projects undertaken during that period cannot erase the colonial character of military conquest, political inequality, cultural assimilation and the suppression of resistance.

After the September 18 Incident of 1931, Japanese forces seized northeastern China and installed the puppet state of Manchukuo to disguise colonial control. Resource extraction, settler expansion and repression inflicted profound harm. The Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 conducted human experimentation and researched biological warfare, victimizing Chinese civilians and people of other nationalities. Archives, testimony and postwar legal records establish these crimes. They cannot be denied, minimized or excused as products of exceptional wartime circumstances.

After full-scale war against China began in 1937, Japanese forces committed massacres, bombing and destruction across the country. During the Nanjing Massacre, large numbers of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed, while rape and looting were widespread. Scholarship differs over the precise numerical scope because methods and definitions vary, but those debates do not alter the fact of mass atrocity confirmed by extensive historical evidence and international judgments. Denying the Nanjing Massacre, or obscuring responsibility through textbook language and political visits to controversial shrines, wounds victims again and corrodes trust with neighboring countries.

Japanese expansion also reached Hong Kong, the Mongolian border and all of Southeast Asia. The occupation of Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945 brought executions, hunger, forced displacement and economic plunder. The 1939 Battles of Khalkhin Gol, known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident, were a major border war between Japan’s Kwantung Army and Soviet-Mongolian forces, demonstrating the catastrophe that can follow when military commands escalate conflict on their own initiative. During the Pacific War, Japan occupied the Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia, Burma and other territories, where massacres, abuse of prisoners, requisitioning and forced labor left enduring trauma.

The “comfort women” system and forced labor demand continuing recognition. The Japanese military directly or indirectly established and administered comfort stations in which many women from the Korean Peninsula, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere were deceived, coerced and subjected to sexual slavery. Millions of Asian laborers, as well as Allied prisoners of war, were forced to work in mines, factories, railways and military projects. Survivors have sought more than abstract diplomatic language: they demand truth, dignity, consistent acknowledgment, education and effective remedy.

The purpose of historical memory is not to transmit guilt to people living in Japan today, still less to incite ethnic hatred. Aggression was launched and carried out by the state institutions, military-political elites and armed machinery of a particular era. Many Japanese civilians also suffered under the militarist system and in air raids, the ground battle in Okinawa and the atomic bombings. Recognizing all civilian suffering is compatible with identifying responsibility for aggression. Rejecting hatred does not require abandoning historical judgment.

Facts, judgments and the boundary of vigilance

“Japan is increasing military expenditure, acquiring long-range strike capabilities and expanding defense partnerships” is a proposition verifiable through documents, budgets and deployment records. “Japanese militarism has already returned” is a political judgment, not an objective fact of the same order. Anyone making that judgment should state the criteria: whether the military has escaped civilian control, society systematically glorifies war, dissent is suppressed or the state seeks aggressive expansion. Japan today retains elections, parliamentary oversight, active media, civil society and a powerful pacifist tradition, placing it fundamentally apart from the military politics of the 1930s.

That difference does not mean troubling trends should be ignored. Security policy has changed through cumulative reinterpretation rather than a full constitutional debate; the executive has expanded secrecy; historical revisionist claims repeatedly return; and long-range weapons and export policies are advancing quickly. These developments can weaken postwar restraints. The most responsible position is neither to declare future war inevitable nor to abandon scrutiny merely because democratic institutions formally remain in place.

The security dilemma applies to every state in the region. Japan’s buildup is driven in part by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, China’s growing military power and maritime disputes. Japan’s additional capabilities then alter threat perceptions in neighboring states. If each side emphasizes only the other’s moves and calls its own response inherently legitimate, a self-reinforcing cycle of hostility follows. Opposing any Japanese return to aggression must not become support for unlimited military expansion by another state, discrimination against ordinary Japanese people or glorification of violence against civilians.

Making peace an executable policy

Reducing danger starts with transparency. Japan’s government should disclose the legal boundaries of counterstrike capabilities, principles for target selection, the civilian authorization chain and full life-cycle costs. The Diet must have a meaningful opportunity for review, while independent media and local governments must be able to scrutinize base construction and evacuation plans. Defense transfers need public, auditable end-use restrictions that prohibit transfers to users engaged in aggression, serious violations of international humanitarian law or activities that cannot be reliably monitored.

History education cannot be a bargaining chip in domestic politics. Japan should teach colonial rule, the war against China, the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, comfort women and forced labor on the basis of historical evidence, while supporting cooperation among scholars, teachers, museums and survivor archives across borders. Neighboring countries should likewise reject turning history education into education for ethnic hatred. Young people should learn about institutions, responsibility and human experience, not be labeled hereditary enemies.

Crisis management must move faster than missile deployment. Japan and China, South Korea, North Korea and other relevant parties need stable communication among leaders and defense institutions, improved maritime and aerial liaison mechanisms, reliable crisis hotlines, clear rules against dangerous approaches and timely notification of major exercises. US-Japan, Japan-Philippines and Japan-Australia cooperation should also become more transparent about the scope and defensive purpose of exercises, avoiding needless strategic ambiguity in sensitive waters and airspace.

The longer-term route is regional arms control and common security. States can begin with missile-test notifications, nuclear-risk reduction, rules for maritime and aerial encounters, constraints on military artificial intelligence, dialogue on conventional missile deployments and cooperation in humanitarian relief, then gradually explore verifiable arms limitations. As the only country to have suffered atomic bombings, Japan should serve as a bridge for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation rather than allow discussion of extended deterrence to obscure the duty to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Asian peace cannot rest on forgetting, but neither can it rest on hatred. Remembering the devastation Japanese aggression inflicted on the Korean Peninsula, China and Southeast Asia helps societies recognize the danger of unrestrained power, historical denial and wartime mobilization. Recognizing Japan’s enduring domestic pacifist forces provides a basis for cooperation across borders. The strongest response to Japan’s militarization shift is not fatalism or nationalist confrontation, but transparency, democratic oversight, honest history education, dependable crisis hotlines, reciprocal arms control and persistent diplomacy for peace.