The return of Japan’s ambition: Shinzo Abe’s assertive foreign policy

There have been few Japanese leaders in the last twenty years who have influenced the course of Japan’s foreign and defence policy as much as current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Following his re-election for a third term in December 2014, the reforms to the posture and nature of Tokyo’s international engagement sought by Abe during his first tenure in 2006 are now secure in Japanese law. Under Abe, Japan has increasingly sought to engage the Indo-Pacific region and influence its diplomatic, economic and military architecture to ensure that Tokyo’s interests are known and met in Asia’s capitals. This renewed effort on Japan’s part can be viewed in the context of the rise of China and the fears within Japan’s security and defence establishment that East Asia and the wider Pacific is increasingly being reordered around the power of Beijing.
The reforms pursued by Shinzo Abe have an important heritage, for he is viewed as the political and intellectual successor to Japan’s most hawkish leader in recent years, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006). After the 9/11 attacks, Koizumi surprised many in Japan by agreeing to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Unable to deploy the special forces and aircraft that other allied states such as Great Britain, Canada and Australia had done, since to do so would have violated Article 9 of Japan’s constitutional, Koizumi dispatched Japan’s Maritime Self-Defence Force (JSDF) warships to the Indian Ocean to support in a logistical capacity, exercising the ghosts of the ‘check book’ diplomacy fiasco during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Likewise under Koizumi, Tokyo pledged $500 million in aid to the Karzai regime in Afghanistan. Successive governments in Tokyo have honoured this pledge, making Japan one of the largest foreign aid donors to Afghanistan.
Koizumi’s most controversial decision however lies in sending 600 reconstruction troops to southern Iraq in February 2004 as part of the US-led Multinational Force-Iraq. This was the first deployment of the JSDF to a combat zone since the Second World War, albeit under the protection of Australian troops. More importantly set the precedent that the JSDF had the means to operate well beyond the Japanese home islands. In an address to the Diet, Koizumi argued that “we would not be meeting our responsibilities as a member of the international community if we were to leave the contribution of personnel to other countries because of the possible danger”. The sentiments behind this speech are important, as Shinzo Abe shares Koizumi’s worldview that Japan should play an international role, equal to its economic and military strength. The words spoken a decade ago by Koizumi on Iraq, could just as easily been spoken by Abe today on the South China Sea.
Shifting Japan’s Security Architecture
Whilst transnational terrorism and the threat posed by 9/11-style attacks dominated Japan’s strategic concerns in the early 2000s, as demonstrated by documentation coming from Tokyo at the time, terrorism has increasingly been replaced by the increasing military threat presented by China’s modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army. The importance of this issue has grown exponentially since 2010 when ties between Tokyo and Beijing deteriorated over the nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain dispute.
According to the JASDF’s own press releases, prior to 2012 the majority of alert scrambles were primarily against Russian intelligence and surveillance aircraft. Since Tokyo’s decision to nationalise the Senkaku/Diayo islands, China has routinely tested Japan’s response times. In 2014, there were a reported 473 intercepts of Russian jets and 464 against those from China. A year later, Japan says it scrambled jets 571 times against Chinese aircraft over the East China Sea and in the first six months of 2016 alone, the JASDF responded to 407 incursion by China, an increase from the 271 intercepts over the same previous 6 month period.
In late 2016, tensions between China and Japan spiked dramatically when a Chinese aerial armada of 40 aircraft consisting of H-6K bombers, part of China’s nuclear triad, escorted by Su-30 fighters and supported by tanker and radar aircraft entered Japanese airspace in the Miyako Strait near Okinawa.
The strategic backdrop of tensions in the East China Sea, stemming from repeated air and maritime violations by China, have provided the political impetus for Shinzo Abe’s amendments to Japan’s foreign and defence policy. His first move was to get the Diet to approve the creation of the National Security Council in November 2013 modelled on its American counterpart, with established hotlines to the United States and the United Kingdom and with plans for further lines to Russia, Australia and China.
The key pillar for Abe’s reforms however lies in the concept of “Collective Self-Defence”. Under Article 9 of the 1946 US-drafted constitution, Japan is forbidden to wage war except in self-defence. Shinzo Abe’s reforms have changed this posture to enable Tokyo to use the JSDF to aid allies such the United States in the event of an attack, as well as providing greater flexibility in committing troops to UN peacekeeping operations such as South Sudan. On September 17th 2015, the Japanese Diet passed the sweeping reforms into legislation in spite of widespread protests, hostile Japanese public opinion and scuffles within the Diet itself between government and opposition law makers.
The result is such that if Tokyo sought a repeat of its deployment to southern Iraq as witnessed in 2004, JSDF personnel would be able to engage in combat operations and even come to the aid of coalition partners under fire.
Concurrent with these historic reforms, in 2014 Shinzo Abe increased Japan’s defence budget for the first time in 11 years, raising it to $48.7 billion USD. In December 2015, the Diet passed a further increase of 1.5 percent for 2016, bringing Japan’s total annual defence spending to a Despite these rises, Japan’s budget remains modest compared to China, where defence spending rose 12.2% to $130 billion USD in 2015, and the US, with President Barack Obama requesting a budget of $585 billion in January 2016.
The Japanese Self-Defence Force under Shinzo Abe has begun modernizing and re-equipping its forces, nervously eyeing the asymmetry emerging between China and Japan’s military strength. The 2015 defence budget, the largest increase in peacetime, is allowing the JSDF to modernize its Aegis guided missile destroyers, establish an amphibious strike group with close ties to the US Marine Corps, and purchase F-35A stealth fighters, 17 Osprey tilt rotor aircraft and 52 amphibious assault vehicles. In August 2015, Japan launched the country’s largest warship since the Second World War, the Izumo-class helicopter carrier Kaga, bringing the total number of amphibious ships available to Japan’s Self Defence Forces to four.
Although ordered under the previous government in 2011, the Izumo class represents an important increase in Japanese amphibious capabilities and in Tokyo’s ability to project power into the Indo-Pacific, as witnessed in the 2017 Malabar naval exercises.
These warships, whilst primarily equipped to operate helicopters, could be modified if needed to embark the F-35B operated by the Royal Navy and the United States Marine Corps, thus giving Japan for the first time since WWII, the option of fielding light aircraft carriers.
In a further sign that Beijing is now viewed as a major security threat, Japan has also begun forward deploying 10,000 Japanese troops who will be stationed on disparate islands in the East China Sea, along with a network of Harpoon anti-ship and Patriot anti-aircraft missiles amounting to a Japanese variant of the “anti-access/area denial” doctrine, known as A2/AD. Three years of continued pressure in the East China Sea by China has left Japan more militarily assertive now than at any time in the post-Cold War era.
Securing Japan’s position in the East China Sea
In response to Beijing’s assertiveness in the East China Sea, Japan has, according to reports circulated in December 2015, begun placing Type-88 anti-ship missile batteries on over 200 islands in the region, many of which form part of the First Island Chain. Developed in the 1980s, the truck-mounted Type-88 has a range of 180 km and is the domestically-produced variant of the United States’ Navy’s Harpoon missile. This deployment has also been complimented by MIM-104 Patriot missile batteries, used to protect Tokyo during the 2013 North Korean crisis. The Abe administration has also announced that over 10,000 JSDF service personnel will be deployed to the islands.
In military vernacular this doctrine, known as Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), is designed as the name suggests to deny maritime spaces to superior naval forces via the asymmetric use of land-based and sea-launched missiles, thus providing strategic depth to a defensive force. The islands where Japan is currently in the process of deploying forces constitute part of the First Island Chain. This line of small islands 1,400 km (870 miles) in length stretches from Kamchatka in the north Pacific towards Taiwan and South East Asia, forming a natural maritime barrier between mainland China and the rest of the Pacific. This strategic fact is not lost on defence planners in Tokyo.
The move by Japan seeks to turn the tables on China as a rising naval power. Under current conditions, vessels from the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) would have to traverse the East China Sea and enter the Pacific under the knowledge that Japanese missile batteries are within the First Island Chain. In the event of a Sino-Japanese conflict, China would not be able to enter the East China Sea without risking significant losses of ships, aircraft and personnel. Thus in effect this move by Japan is denying Beijing the ability to operate militarily in disputed waters relatively close to the Chinese mainland.
The Japanese Self Defence Forces are experienced players in the field of maritime and homeland defence. Throughout the Cold War, Japan was faced with the very real prospect of the Soviet Pacific Fleet launching an amphibious assault on Hokkaido, the northernmost of the home islands. Defence planners in Tokyo sought to counter superior Soviet maritime power with a similar strategy of overlapping defences based on long range anti-air and anti-ship missiles. We are now seeing a substantial transfer of equipment and attention from the North Pacific to the East China Sea with the PLAN’s East Sea Fleet rapidly replacing Russia’s Pacific squadron as the principal source of concern.
Through the implementation of this doctrine in the East China Sea, Japan now joins a growing list of Asian nations who have developed their own A2/AD strategy in maritime spaces. The most notable of these is China itself, whose eyes remain firmly fixed on the role of the US 7th Fleet and the US Pacific Command.
Building Japan’s alliances
Prior to the announcement in 2015 of the US-Japan defence guidelines, there existed a high degree of scepticism within the Abe administration over the commitment of the Obama administration to Japan’s territory in the East China Sea. Thus it is revealing that under Abe, Japan has sought to strengthen ties with regional democracies including India and Australia. During his first term in 2006, Abe promoted the concept of a quadrilateral security dialogue between Canberra, New Delhi, Tokyo and Washington that would have ensured stability and security within the Asia-Pacific. The concept underlying this alliance lay in China’s rise. However, both the Labour government in Australia and the Congress-led coalition in India were sceptical and hesitant to enter into any agreement that could have been viewed as containment of Beijing.
Yet since 2012, in the face of a far more assertive China in the East and South China Seas and amid tensions on the Sino-Indian border, Abe has once again pursued his vision of a quadrilateral security framework, though not in the form of a formal organisation. Rather the Abe administration has pushed for closer ties on a bilateral basis. In the case of Australia, which has also expressed concern about China’s conduct in the South China Sea, Japan has recently been vying for a lucrative contract to build advanced diesel electric submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Further to this military cooperation, Japan under Abe has for the first time sent JSDF personnel to the Talisman Sabre military exercises held in Australia.
Concerning India, Abe has sought to turn strong bilateral ties into a true strategic relationship, enjoying a strong personal rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indo-Japanese relations have flourished in the last two years, with India seeking to attract high technology exports and investment from Tokyo including $15 billion high speed trains and US-2 amphibious aircraft amongst others. Meanwhile, Japan deployed JSDF warships in 2014 and 2015 to the Indian Ocean in order to participate in the Malabar naval exercises jointly hosted by India and which include treaty ally the United States.
Abe has also reached out to traditional US allies beyond the Asia-Pacific. In 2014, he formalized Japan’s ties with NATO by concluding an individual partnership and cooperation program and signalled interest in joining a 12-nation NATO missile defence program. Abe has also deepened Japan’s bilateral defence ties with France and the United Kingdom by signing military equipment and technology transfer agreement with Paris and a defence equipment cooperation agreement with the London.
For the first time since the Cold War, Royal Air Force Typhoons will conduct joint military exercises with the JSDF in a further signal of bilateral cooperation between two key US allies.
There can now be no questioning that Japan is as active now in foreign and security policy as at any other time in recent memory. The fact that Shinzo Abe has survived longer than a year as prime minister and has now influenced Japan’s foreign policy make him a figure of true historical importance. The question that now should be asked is how will China respond and above all, where.
