"New Fighting Power!" for Japan?

Japanese strategists struggled for decades to find a way to field a robust military despite legal, political, and normative constraints on the expansion of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Their progress was steady and significant, but slow. Now, leveraging off (and playing up) a perceived shift in the nature of the threat Japan faces, they have found a less constrained and highly efficacious route to force transformation.

The Japan Coast Guard (JCG) now has what its publicists, citing capabilities explicitly banned by the Constitution, call "New Fighting Power!" They have used the JCG budget to surpass the self-imposed limit on defense spending -- one percent of GDP -- and have strengthened overall Japanese maritime capabilities. In the process, they have changed the rules of naval engagement, asserted new maritime rights, circumvented the ban on the export of arms, and have taken a giant step toward exercising the right of collective self-defense, a capability Japan had long denied itself.

The Japanese archipelago has one of the most extensive coastlines in the world and Tokyo has significant territorial disputes with each of its neighbors. The newly empowered JCG has both a law enforcement (preventing illegal crossings) and a security mission asserting sovereignty claims and preventing other states from asserting theirs. This development has collateral -- but counter-intuitive -- political implications as well. As two analysts suggest, "Japan's support for counterterrorism in Southeast Asia" -- a large component of which involves the build-up of the JCG -- "is also part of a wider strategy for enhancing its political and security role in the region." By raising the visibility and capabilities of the JCG, strategists are moving Japan beyond the rigid separation between police and military functions so ill-suited to the security agenda of great powers after the Cold War and 9/11, and so constraining of Tokyo's diplomacy.

JCG modernization and expansion not only enhances Japan's power projection capabilities, but it also enhances its influence projection -- and it does so without the destabilizing consequences that a shift in the formal defense budget might entail. Remarkably, confidence building is being achieved both with Japan's ever vigilant neighbors and from its domestic public, though not without some misgivings. Japan's neighbors -- including China and Korea -- have hardly blinked at the bulking up of Japan's Coast Guard. While the JCG will not become a "second navy," it is already de facto a fourth branch of the Japanese military, one laden with more positive than negative political significance for both Japanese diplomacy and national identity.

Stretching Constraints

The primary formal restraint on the growth of the postwar Japanese military has been Article 9 of the Constitution, prohibiting the use of force as a means of settling international disputes and denying Japan possession of "war potential." Still, Japan's Defense Agency (JDA) and Self-Defense Forces (SDF) were established in 1954 amid lexical somersaults that have ever since complicated the stratagems of Japanese leaders. "War potential" now would be defined on a sliding scale. Armed forces could be maintained after all, and Japan could have a military. But the public retained vivid memories of a devastating war, and had to be brought along slowly. The balance of public opinion valued protection from, more than protection by, their military.

Over time, significant new constraints were added, as Japan's cheap ride on U.S. security guarantees became the central feature of Japan's grand strategy. In order to reassure Japanese citizens that its government would not embark on foreign adventures and its neighbors that Japan no longer posed a military threat, Japan would follow the mercantilist strategy of a trading state rather than the military strategy of a great power.