Tokyo escalates arms spend amid frictions with China

Japan’s government has passed its largest-ever defence budget amid a tense two-year territorial standoff with China.

The \4.98-trillion yen ($42 billion) package tops the previous record set in 2002 and mark’s Japan’s third straight year of increased military spending.

The military shopping list includes 30 amphibious vehicles, three unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, six high-tech F35A stealth fighters and five Osprey, a US-made helicopter with the range of an airplane.

Millions more have been pledged to defend the country’s remote outlying islands, including the Senkakus, claimed by China which calls them Diaoyu.

Changing situation

Defence minister Gen Nakatani cited the “changing situation around Japan” as the reason for the spending. “The level of defence spending reflects the amount necessary to protect Japan’s air, sea, and land, and guard the lives and property of our citizens,” he said.

Shinzo Abe, Japan's hawkish prime minister, returned to power in 2012 promising to reverse a long-term decline in military spending and upgrade the nation's defence posture.

Last year, he ended a ban on selling weapons overseas and reinterpreted Japan’s constitution to allow it to come to the aid of a military ally, a milestone in the country’s steady retreat from postwar pacifism.

Japan does not refer directly to threats from its powerful neighbour in its latest defence white paper but has long criticised China’s military build-up.

Officials with Japan’s defence ministry say China’s military budget has multiplied 30 times over the last decade and its annual defence spending is roughly twice Japan’s.

Japan’s 2015 budget includes money to deploy combat vehicles near the Senkakus and for a radar unit and military base on the tiny frontier island of Yonaguni, the closest Japanese territory to mainland China.

The defence ministry also wants to build up an amphibious assault force, modelled on the US marines, to take remote territory from enemy hands, part of a strategic shift to the south and southwest.

Defence budgets are falling in the West but rapidly rising in Asia. Military expenditure in Asia and Oceania rose 3.6 per cent in 2013, according the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Japan’s latest budget includes $1.4 billion to relocate a controversial US marine base from crowded Ginowan City in Okinawa to a remote fishing village in the same prefecture.

Proactive pacifism

Mr Abe’s government says it intends to build the new offshore base despite the opposition of most of Okinawa’s population and its newly elected governor. In 2013, Mr Abe told the United Nations that Japan will “newly bear” the flag of “proactive pacifism”, an unintentionally Orwellian-sounding phrase that stands in for a potentially more controversial one: confronting rising China.

Japan also recently launched the Izumo, a 250m-long “flat-topped destroyer” loaded with helicopters. Named after a second World War armoured cruiser that was sunk by the US navy in 1945, the warship joins two other helicopter ships that China and others have branded “quasi-aircraft carriers”.