Earlier this year, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio visited five Group of Seven countries in a bid to expand security cooperation. The tour was meant to lay the groundwork for Japan’s hosting of the next G-7 summit in Hiroshima in May. It was also intended to seek security assurances and build up support among Tokyo’s Western partners for a new era of Japanese foreign and defense policy amid rising tensions with China.
Combined with recently released major security policy documents, including the National Defense Strategy, the Defense Buildup Plan and the National Security Strategy, the moves collectively signal Tokyo’s commitment to becoming a stabilizing force in its region and playing a more proactive role as a global power in the 21st century.
During Kishida’s visit to key G-7 countries, he signed a Reciprocal Access Agreement in London between Japan and the United Kingdom that would enhance military interoperability. During a stop in Rome, he launched the Global Combat Air Program, a joint program between Italy, Japan and the U.K. to develop an advanced, next-generation fighter aircraft. A joint statement released after a “2+2” meeting in Washington between Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi and Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada and their U.S. counterparts, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, warned of a “severely contested environment” and underscored the need for the U.S., Europe and Japan to “work together as one” to counter China’s rise.
As part of that effort, in December, the Kishida government announced Japan’s largest military buildup since World War II, which included the unveiling of a five-year, $320 billion spending plan that would enable Tokyo develop “counter-strike capability” against real and perceived threats. The plan will double the country’s defense spending from 1 to 2 percent of GDP over the next five years.
In addition to its domestic buildup, Japan established a new security cooperation grant mechanism that would boost the military capabilities of its regional partners. It is also considering several bilateral and multilateral initiatives including a Visiting Forces Agreement to enhance maritime security cooperation with the Philippines, which seeks to better protect its waters and fishermen in the contested South China Sea. Discussions over a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Manila that would enable expanded joint military exercises and the transfer of military hardware are also in the works. A tripartite agreement between the United States, Japan and the Philippines is already operational, and joint patrols in the South China Sea with the U.S. could soon expand to include Australia and the Philippines. Japan also launched the first-ever “2 plus 2” dialogue between its defense and foreign ministers and their counterparts from Indonesia and the Philippines. Those meetings were designed to enhance the maritime security capabilities of Japan’s Southeast Asian partners, and included the delivery of advanced radar systems to the Philippines.
Japan is overhauling its postwar defense strategy in response to China’s growing assertiveness in regional waters and growing fears of that Beijing will authorize a military invasion of Taiwan. As a result of concerns in the U.S. about Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region, Japan is becoming central to Washington’s “integrated strategy” against China, even as it continues to take major steps toward achieving strategic autonomy in an increasingly uncertain global environment.
Japan’s geopolitical position has changed significantly in the past 30 years, and its reemergence as a major power has been a long time in the making. In 1990, Japan’s GDP represented 15 percent of the global economy, compared to around 3 percent today. In East Asia, Japan accounted for 70 percent of the region’s GDP and 45 percent of regional trade in 1990. By 2014, Japan’s share of regional GDP was down to a little over 20 percent, while its share of regional trade fell to approximately 15 percent.
Japan is becoming central to Washington’s “integrated strategy” against China, even as it continues to take major steps toward achieving strategic autonomy.
In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the largest economy in Asia and the second-largest in the world. Just as dramatic was the shift in the balance of military power in the region: Within a decade, Japan saw its defense budget go from being 60 percent more than China’s to being just a third of it by the early-2010s. By 2021, China’s defense budget was more than five times larger than that of Japan.
Alarmed by Japan’s declining strategic position, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo embarked on a project of national revival that included a more muscular and proactive foreign policy. Back home, he launched the so-called Abenomics, a series of structural reforms designed to grow the Japanese economy and make it more dynamic and globally competitive following decades of stagflation. As part of Tokyo’s ambitious geopolitical agenda, he launched a global charm offensive that focused on courting likeminded powers, particularly the United States, but also India and Australia, thus laying down the foundation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad.
In 2007, during Abe’s first stint as prime minister, he delivered a landmark speech at the Indian Parliament in which he spoke of a “broader Asia” that encompassed “the confluence of the two seas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.” Crucially, Abe underscored the need for “democratic nations located at opposite edges of these seas” to constitute an “arc of freedom and prosperity.” In practical terms, Abe rolled out the “Indo-Pacific” strategic doctrine that would later come to dominate contemporary geopolitical discourse and the strategic calculus of regional and global powers.
After he returned to power in 2012, Abe vowed to “build a new country” that was prosperous at home, while he took steps to revamp Japan’s postwar foreign policy in order to make it a bigger force on the international stage. By then, China was widely regarded as a potentially threatening force, and as a result, Abe proposed a “Democratic Security Diamond” across the Indo-Pacific region to counter Beijing’s growing ambitions. With economic momentum gradually picking up at home, Abe doubled down on Tokyo’s strategic investment overseas. In 2015, he launched a $110 billion infrastructural investment fund for the Indo-Pacific region as a counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. By 2019, Japan’s new infrastructure investment commitments in Southeast Asia alone were valued at $367 billion, outstripping China’s $255 billion in investments.
Elsewhere, Abe led the charge on trade and regional economic integration. In 2017, after the administration of then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, Japan led the effort to revive the agreement, and the following year it was finalized as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
A European Union-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, the second-largest in the world, entered into force in January 2019. Under Abe and his hand-picked successor, Yoshihide Suga, Japan expanded strategic investment cooperation with Tokyo’s Western partners under the Blue Dot Network with the U.S. and Australia, and it is a signatory to the Build Back Better World, or B3W, with other G-7 powers.
Just as significantly, Japan’s defense posture went through a major evolution under Abe. Although he failed to garner sufficient parliamentary and public support for a revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution, Abe’s government adopted the controversial “collective self-defense” doctrine, which authorizes Japan to intervene militarily on behalf of allied nations in the event of an attack. That reform paved the way for expanded military cooperation, including Japan’s participation in joint major war games, with regional partners ranging from India in South Asia and Australia in the South Pacific to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines in Southeast Asia.
In 2018, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, or JSDF, deployed an armored vehicle to the Philippines for joint military exercises between Japan, the Philippines and the U.S., marking a major milestone in the postwar era. Last year, Japan’s air self-defense force marked another milestone after deploying fighter jets for joint exercises with its Filipino counterparts.
China’s expanding military footprint across the South and East China Seas has been a major driver of Japan’s growing defense ties with Southeast Asia. In more recent years, however, Taiwan has also emerged as a strategic priority for Tokyo. A few months before his assassination in mid-2022, Abe called for the U.S. to abandon its longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, arguing that “showing it may intervene … keeps China in check.” During a high-profile speech in Taiwan, he declared that “a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency,” suggesting the high likelihood that Japan would react militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Amid major reforms of its defense and security policy, Japan is now in an unprecedented position to play a decisive role in shaping peace and security outcomes in the Indo-Pacific region, especially along so-called First Island Chain that contains the South and East China Sea as well as Taiwan. While the government will likely run into obstacles in its bid to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution as a step toward codifying those reforms, the steps Tokyo is taking to achieve strategic autonomy and assert itself as a major power mean that it is poised to play a key role as the linchpin of Washington’s “integrated strategy” against China.
Richard Javad Heydarian is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Asian Center, and the author of “The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China and the New Struggle for Mastery” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), among others.