Japan's moves to boost the role of its armed forces are rekindling fears that the country's elites have adopted a belligerent nationalist ideology.
The crisis on the Korean peninsula took a turn for the worse Wednesday as news agencies reported that Japan is preparing to deploy several warships to the region alongside a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group. The move has rekindled fears that the government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is opportunistically seizing the increased tensions in order to revive militarism and advance a nationalistic right-wing agenda.
Reuters and the Japan-based Kyodo news agency both cited top officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, who said that the Japanese military plans on mobilizing multiple destroyers from its naval forces to take part in drills with the U.S. battle group in the East China Sea led by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.
“Japan wants to dispatch several destroyers as the Carl Vinson enters the East China Sea,” one of the sources said.
On Tuesday, Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Admiral Yutaka Murakawa was evasive when asked by the press about the joint exercises.
“If you are talking about the U.S. Navy in broad terms, it is possible that we could have a joint exercise with them when the opportunity arises, but if you are asking me about having one with the USS Carl Vinson on this occasion, I should refrain from commenting on that,” said Murakawa, according to The Asahi Shimbun.
The ongoing war of words between Pyongyang and Washington has alarmed regional powers, who fear that the tension surrounding weapons tests by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) may trigger the largest crisis East Asia has seen since the Korean War.
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a telephone conversation with his U.S. counterpart to restate China's desire for a peaceful resolution of the issue and the need for maintaining communication and coordination with the United States. Trump, who recently held a meeting with Xi at his Mar-a-Lago mansion, agreed on the need to maintain a dialog.
The phone call followed belligerent tweets Tuesday by the U.S. president where Trump claimed that the “the menace of North Korea” is “looking for trouble” and warned Beijing that if it doesn't decide to help the U.S. “solve the problem” of the DPRK the U.S. will take unilateral action. Trump ended the tweet, “U.S.A.”
The DPRK has warned of a harsh fallout resulting from continued aggressive moves by the United States.
“We will hold the U.S. wholly accountable for the catastrophic consequences to be entailed by its outrageous actions,” North Korea's Central News Agency quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying Tuesday, adding that the country “is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”
Japan's recent moves to boost the international role of its armed forces are rekindling fears that the country's elites have adopted a belligerent nationalist ideology. Last December, the Abe administration approved its largest-ever defense budget of US$42.5 billion, drawing tens of thousands of protesters into the streets.
Prime Minister Abe has faced accusations of nostalgia for the Japanese imperialism of the first half of the 20th century, when Japan was a colonial power that inflicted numerous crimes against humanity on the people of neighboring countries.
The Japanese head of state is one of 280 lawmakers that belongs to the parliamentary league of Nippon Kaigi, a right-wing nationalist organization founded in 1997 that seeks a return to Japan's pre-WWII “beautiful traditional national character.” The group derides the mainstream narrative regarding wartime Japanese atrocities committed throughout Asia as a “self-destructive history” and sees many of Japan's modern social ills as stemming from the 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and pacifist constitution imposed on the country following its unconditional surrender to occupying U.S. forces.
According to a 2014 U.S. Congressional report, the Japanese prime minister's group believes “Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 ‘Nanjing massacre’ were exaggerated or fabricated.”
Japan's education ministry, which Nippon Kaigi seeks to transform into a means to “foster a sense of Japanese identity,” recently approved the inclusion of jukendo, or “way of the bayonet” training, in its middle school physical education curriculum. The move drew criticism from Japanese citizens as well as Chinese and Korean press outlets as redolent of the indoctrination techniques of the country's imperial era. The so-called “traditional sport” was a training item for the Imperial Japanese Army prior to the country's WWII defeat and involves thrusting blunted wooden bayonets toward opponents' vital regions such as the chest and throat.
In March, the 19,500-ton Japanese helicopter-carrier destroyer Kaga entered service. The ship, Japan's second helicopter carrier, raised alarm bells as it was named after a World War II-era Japanese Imperial Navy battleship with the same name.
“China and its neighbors will never allow Japan to make trouble," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying remarked at the time.
