Last Tuesday, 67-year-old Shigeru Ishiba became Japan’s new prime minister. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) turned to Ishiba after plummeting in opinion polls amid persistent revelations regarding LDP politicians using their positions for financial gain.
Ishiba immediately appointed a new cabinet and also announced that he would dissolve parliament’s House of Representatives on October 9 with an election set for October 27.
In his first official statement, Ishiba pledged to “protect” Japan and his election platform focuses on reconstruction in areas affected by the earthquake on the Noto peninsula and economic growth.
What has caught the attention of the press, however, is Ishiba’s relative silence regarding military matters. Known as a “military nerd”, Ishiba has been a prominent advocate of Japan mobilizing its military, the “Self-Defense Forces” to defend the United States if necessary.
Though Ishiba is downplaying military affairs in the election, his military playbook is regularly coming back to haunt him.
A day after taking office, Ishiba called US president Biden and he told reporters in Japan that he had assured Biden that he would further strengthen US-Japan military ties. The official summary of the talk shows that geopolitics and military relations were Ishiba’s main concern.
And days before becoming prime minister, Ishiba sketched his vision for a major boost for Japan’s military in an essay, “The Future of Japan’s Foreign Policy,” written for the Hudson Institute, an ultra-conservative thinktank in Washington.
The Ishiba vision
Ishiba would like to bolster Japan’s military in order to strengthen the “Japan-US alliance as an ‘equal nation’ on par with the US-UK alliance.” The current US-Japan Security Treaty and the Status of Forces Agreement obliges Japan to provide bases for the US in Japan in exchange for a US commitment to defend Japan in case of attack.
The US has more military bases in Japan than in any other country, most of which are on indigenous Okinawa. For years peace groups in Japan and Okinawa have fought to rid their lands of the US bases. Recently, the Okinawa Interest Group highlighted the continuing problem of sexual assault by US military personnel on the island.
Ishiba, however, is committed not to reducing the US military in Japan but rather to rebalancing the military alliance by stationing Japan’s military forces on Guam, a US military outpost; by jointly managing US bases in Japan; and by making the Japan-US military alliance the core of a new “Asian version of NATO”.
Equating Ukraine and Taiwan
“Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow.” wrote Ishiba in his recent essay for the Hudson Institute. “Replacing Russia with China and Ukraine with Taiwan, the absence of a collective self-defense system like NATO in Asia means that wars are likely to break out because there is no obligation for mutual defense.”
In drawing parallels between Ukraine and Taiwan, Ishiba neglects the fact that Ukraine is an independent country whose sovereignty was violated by Russia. Taiwan is not an independent state, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long claimed it as an integral part of China, a view acknowledged by the US, Canada, and Japan when they finally established diplomatic relations with China in the 1970s.
Japan colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. At the end of World War II, Japan renounced any claim over Taiwan (then called Formosa) and according to international accords (Yalta), Taiwan was to be returned to China. That process was interrupted by the civil war in China and by US intervention during the Korean War.
Today, the Japanese government uses the divisions in Taiwan over the island’s relationship with China to stoke fears about China and promote a new military alliance in the Asia Pacific.
An Asian version of NATO (アジア版NATO)
Critics of NATO fear the US-led alliance is poised to expand into the Pacific, pointing to the 2023 Madrid summit at which NATO adopted a ‘Strategic Concept’ calling for a global NATO to address “systemic challenges posed by the PRC to Euro-Atlantic security and ensure NATO’s enduring ability to guarantee the defence and security of Allies.”
However, that vision is not shared by Ishiba who wants a “Made in Asia” alliance with the Japan-US Security Agreement as the centrepiece.
Citing Japan’s “quasi-alliance” relationships with Canada, Australia, the Philippines, India, France and the UK, Ishiba stressed that Japan and the US are deepening security cooperation with South Korea.
“If these alliances are upgraded,” stated Ishiba, “a hub-and-spoke system, with the Japan-US alliance at its core, will be established, and in the future, it will be possible to develop the alliance into an Asian version of NATO.”
According to Ishiba, an Asian version of NATO, “must ensure deterrence against the nuclear alliance of China, Russia, and North Korea. The Asian version of NATO must also specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”
The move to giving Japan access to nuclear weapons is opposed by a large majority of the population, with a reported 75 percent wanting Japan to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The Cold War that never was and still is
After World War II, the US used its control over Japan to seize Okinawa and then forced Japan to accept US bases on its territories as a condition for a 1951 peace treaty that ended the US occupation of Japan and allowed Japan to become independent.
The US then constructed an arc of military bases in Asia to intimidate the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and other socialist countries during what has been called the ‘Cold War’. This term, a way of portraying the US-USSR standoff in Europe and elsewhere, is a Eurocentric expression given that the US involvement in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and southeast Asia led to the deaths of over six million people.
Today, the US military arc includes over 300 military installations in Asia and confrontations are increasing. What some refer to as a Cold War 2.0 could easily escalate into another hot war, as Ishiba plans to negotiate with the US and rebalance their military alliance.
Because his predecessors had never really worked on the revision, Ishiba’s approach makes him look unique in the sense of trying to achieve equality and independence from the US policies. But this attempt is not to restrain the US military presence in Japan, but to increase it and to expand collaborate with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Thus, his solution to human rights violations by the US soldiers in Japan, is to strengthen Japan’s military and put it on an equal footing with the US.
Under pressure from the US, Japan has gradually developed offensive capabilities for its military. This process gained momentum in 2015 when the LDP revised Japan’s national security law to allow the military to be dispatched overseas.
Today, Japan’s military is regularly participating in war games and patrols with the US, Australia, Canada and others, including in the South China Sea, as part of its heightened military profile.
In order to bring about a Pacific Treaty Organization similar to NATO, Ishiba hopes to introduce major changes allowing further militarization of Japan. A first step would be to introduce a military charter, a “Basic Law on National Security” that Ishiba describes as “one of the pillars of my foreign and national security policy.”
Such a law would legalize military use of public and private facilities and resources under a ‘state of emergency’, expand military capacities further than what the current legislation permits. ‘National emergency’ legislation was created when Ishiba was the Defence Agency Minister in 2003 and, for the first time, enabled the government to give the US military access to Japanese non-military facilities in a ‘state of emergency,’ under which people’s constitutional rights, including the freedom of assembly, privacy, and even private property rights to lands and ports, are suspended. It seems reasonable to assume that the Basic Law on National Security would further restrict civil liberties and support authoritarian leaderships.
Ishiba would then follow up with a campaign to carry out “the LDP’s long-cherished desire to revise the Constitution.” The revision hoped for is the elimination of Article 9 of the Constitution that prohibits the government’s use of military force as the mean of solving international issues.
Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party has long campaigned to eliminate Article 9 and legalize Japan’s possession of nuclear weapons. Public opposition, however, forced the LDP to change its strategy, proposing instead to create a ‘state of emergency’ or notwithstanding clause in the Constitution, to give the government extraordinary powers in the case of war or national crisis. This ‘state of emergency’ clause would work in tandem with Ishiba’s vision of the Basic Law on National Security to reshape Japan so that it could deploy its military all over the world, no longer constrained within the country nor to neighbouring regions only.
Ishiba is certainly the most passionate among the postwar-born prime ministers on enhancing Japan’s military power, ignoring its dark past. But his policies are not necessarily aligned with US policies, whether it be revising the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement or forming an Asian NATO. If he fails in his attempt to gain equal status with the US, Japan would deepen its political subordination to the US, and the Self Defence Forces could become another arm of the US military. If he succeeds, the Self Defence Forces could be more equal to the US military, but it would no longer focus on self-defence. It would turn into a powerful military force that would bring more tension and conflicts to the region, not peace.
How far Ishiba will get in implementing his vision is unclear. Military growth is not the most immediate nor important political issue for most Japanese people who suffer from low wages and a rising cost of living. They are demanding Ishiba clean up corruption, not play military games to fulfill his dreams of an Asian NATO.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
