“They pay in yen, we pay in blood!” Such was the refrain when, after the Gulf War broke out in 1990, Japan’s leaders decided that under the terms of its American-authored postwar constitution they could not send forces to the Middle East. All they could do was write a very large cheque: some $13 billion. This led to the perception, in some quarters, that the Japanese preferred to throw money at problems rather than take risks. When the Kuwaiti government took out an advert in the New York Times to thank the countries that had helped liberate them from Saddam Hussein, there was no mention of Japan. It was a public relations catastrophe.
Ever since the formation of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (SDF) back in July 1954, Japan has argued over its remit and how best to present its role to the public, both at home and abroad. The general approach up until 1990 was neatly expressed by a senior figure in the SDF: “The pheasant would not be shot, but for its cries.” In other words, given worries within Japan and across East Asia that the SDF might somehow be a continuation of the old Imperial Japanese Army, which in the mid-20th century had subverted democracy at home and waged war abroad, the best thing the SDF could do was to keep its head down. That policy, it became clear, would have to change.
The SDF had its roots in a National Police Reserve (NPR), formed in 1950 with the strong encouragement of the American-led Occupation administration. Its official remit was to keep the peace at home while American troops stationed in Japan for that purpose went off to fight in the Korean War. Keen to shore up their Asian ally, the US equipped the NPR and encouraged its enlargement, regarding it not so much as a police force as the nucleus of a future Japanese army. And indeed, it would have been an impressive domestic insurrection whose quelling required the use of the NPR’s bazookas, flame-throwers, tanks and artillery.
The morphing of the National Police Reserve into the Self-Defence Forces — Ground, Maritime and Air — did not alter the official interpretation of the constitution in Japan. While the UN Charter allowed for both individual and collective self-defence, Japan permitted itself only the former. It could not come to the aid of its ally, the United States. Even then, the SDF had to work hard to build up a degree of trust with the Japanese public, taking on roles in civil engineering projects and disaster relief. When, in 1960, Tokyo erupted in violent protest against the renewal of Japan’s unpopular security treaty with the United States, there was a moment when it looked as though the SDF might be called upon to intervene. This would have been disastrous: confirming domestic fears that Japan might be becoming once again the kind of society where the military held the whip-hand.
Fortunately, the moment passed and the SDF struggled on, using the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 to help bolster its reputation. The SDF helped out with security, contributed athletes to some of the events — including the winner of a gold medal in weightlifting — and even dazzled the crowds with an aerobatics show, courtesy of its display team “Blue Impulse”. Three years later, the SDF enjoyed what seemed at first to be a great propaganda coup, when the celebrated writer Mishima Yukio enlisted in the Ground Self-Defence Forces. The moment soured in November 1970, when Mishima attempted to instigate an actual coup from inside a GSDF barracks in Tokyo and then took his own life in grizzly, samurai fashion when it failed.
In the wake of the Gulf War, and the reputational damage done to Japan, the Japanese Defence Agency (now the Ministry of Defence) began to do what countries like the United States had been doing for a long time: seek to massage public opinion surrounding their own armed forces with the help of top PR experts. The advertising giant Dentsū was enlisted and the SDF gained its very own mascot: the cute and inoffensive Prince Pickles, whose story was told in a dedicated manga series. Pickles is convinced that his peaceful, idyllic Paprika Kingdom has no need of its defence force. His father, the king, sees things differently. The prince cannot succeed him, says the king, unless he first learns at first-hand the value of maintaining such a force. Cue a series of adventures, involving a nearby ally, the Broccoli Kingdom and an Evil Empire just next-door, in the course of which Pickles learns that there can be no peace without a deterrent.
Prince Pickles and his love-interest, Miss Parsley, were eventually retired as SDF mascots, replaced by a boy and girl named Takuma-kun (from the Japanese word for “resolute”) and Yū-chan (from a word meaning “kind”). Meanwhile, the Self-Defence Forces have tried a range of other tactics to win over the public, from Miss Air Force Contests to music festivals. Then there are the live fire exercises held each year at the GSDF’s training area at the base of Mount Fuji, which used to attract tens of thousands of spectators before becoming a live-stream only event in 2023.
Opinion polls suggest that some combination of PR efforts, SDF contributions to disaster relief in Japan — most notably in the aftermath of the triple disasters of 2011 (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown) — and the tense security situation in East Asia is warming people in Japan to their Self-Defence Forces. The SDF is now trusted more than the police, and about the same as the country’s hospitals. The question is whether and how their remit may change in the future.
The political and diplomatic context for the contemporary SDF was set by Shinzō Abe during his second term as prime minister, from 2012 to 2020. A National Security Council was created in order to centralise security policy and a National Security Strategy was developed, whose core aim was for Japan to make a “proactive contribution to peace”. The ban on Japan engaging in collective self-defence was lifted and multilateral relationships in the Asia-Pacific were strengthened, notably via Japan’s membership of the “Quad” alongside the United States, Australia and India. Since 2022, Japan has also been a regular attendee at Nato meetings, where this week the threat from China was once again restated. Meanwhile, efforts have been made both to improve relations with China, with which Japan has very strong economic ties, and to ensure that the US-Japan alliance remained strong enough to withstand the doubts noisily expressed by Donald Trump while on the campaign trail and later as president.
Little has changed under Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, who served for many years as Abe’s foreign minister, except that worries about China, Russia and North Korea have intensified. There have long been debates about whether the Self-Defence Forces ought to develop a means of pre-emptively destroying missile launch facilities abroad rather than relying on ballistic missile defence — giving itself, to use the military lingo, a spear to go alongside the shield. At the same time, heavy investment is being made in space and cyber capabilities, and joint exercises have been carried out in recent years with the British Army, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Marines. The SDF has even opened its first ever overseas base at Djibouti International Airport — dubbed an “activity hub” in deference to those old, lingering fears about what Japan’s Self-Defence Forces might eventually get up to.
One of the greatest challenges for the SDF is the threat of China attempting to take Taiwan by force. The fear in Japan is not just of being drawn into any resulting conflict, but being drawn in only for the United States to prove unable or unwilling to look after Japan’s security should the fighting spiral out of control. Japan’s south-western islands might then be at risk, since it is from here that elements of any American response to an attack on Taiwan might be launched.
Those south-western islands include the tiny sub-tropical paradise of Yonaguni, home to around 1,700 people, and from where it is sometimes possible to get a glimpse of Taiwan’s coastline, just over 100 kilometres away. Residents and visitors already share space with SDF personnel operating radar bases on the island, and there are plans for expansion. Earlier this year the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, paid the island a visit — the first ever to make the trip.
Residents of Yonaguni are divided on what all this might mean for their island. Some fear that the military build-up here and on nearby Japanese islands will only make tensions worse. Others take a view similar to that of Prince Pickles, back in the Nineties: there can be no peace without a strong deterrent. Security analysts including Matsuda Yasuhiro, at Tokyo University, argue that a Chinese operation against Taiwan might include the taking of Japanese islands for use as forward operating bases. Matsuda believes that China may wait a few more years yet, for its military capabilities to grow and American interest in Taiwan to decline. At that point, Japanese people’s faith in the Self-Defence Forces may face its toughest test yet.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/