Japan's security problem is its mistaken ambition

According to The Asahi Shimbun, Japan's Defense Ministry is preparing to create three new bureaus in 2027, covering defense infrastructure, international policy and military facilities. Unlike the usual bureaucratic reshuffle, this is a pure institutional expansion of the country's "defense" administration. It comes as Tokyo is reportedly seeking a record military budget of about 8.9 trillion yen ($56 billion), with the final figure potentially reaching 10 trillion yen.

That is not merely more defense spending. It is the construction of a large war machine.

Japan says it needs more military power because its neighborhood is becoming more "dangerous". But its reasoning is circular. As Japan builds more military power, it increasingly interprets ordinary developments in that neighborhood through a military lens — which then becomes justification for still more military power.

Consider fishing boats.

When China's summer fishing moratorium ended on Sunday, more than 8,000 Fujian fishing vessels returned to sea. This is hardly a mysterious development: the fishermen fish when the moratorium ends. Yet Japanese media immediately portrayed the movement as something to be monitored, with speculation about a Chinese "maritime militia".

The remarkable thing is how easily a fishing fleet can now be transformed, in the political imagination, into a "military formation".

Japan's military transformation is also occurring in technology and trade. Tokyo has tightened restrictions affecting semiconductor manufacturing equipment and high-end machinery exported to China, while broader economic measures increasingly treat commercial interdependence as a strategic liability. The stated language is "national security". The practical effect is to make technological containment part of Japan's China policy.

Then there is history, which is where the story becomes much more uncomfortable.

On Saturday, the 81st anniversary of Japan's unconditional surrender marking the end of World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi paid tribute to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, although she did it from a stage-managed distance, she did not express remorse for Japan's wartime aggression in Asia. Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, meanwhile, along with other key Cabinet members, visited the shrine, which honors 14 convicted Class-A war criminals.

A country genuinely confident in its postwar identity does not need to blur the line between remembering its war dead and confronting the historical consequences of the war itself.

Nor does Japan need to build up its military in order to become a "normal country".

The most disturbing possibility is that Japan's security policy is becoming a form of political self-reinforcement: China is intentionally presented as the "danger", military expansion as the answer, with historical revisionism as the emotional fuel and alliance-building as the geopolitical accelerator.

Japan's growing cooperation with Western partners, including NATO countries, adds fuel to the military boiler. Instead of building a security architecture based on dialogue and regional stability, Tokyo increasingly appears comfortable with bloc politics — effectively inviting outsiders deeper into an already combustible neighborhood.

References to Pearl Harbor by the US president are anathema to Takaichi, as they touch a raw nerve among Japan's neo-militarist circles. The surprise attack, after all, stands as a historic testament to Japan's strategic duplicity — and a lingering reminder of the deep historical fault lines that continue to riddle the US-Japan alliance. Today, that relationship is less a genuine partnership than a transactional arrangement, sustained more by mutual convenience than by shared trust.

Does China really "threaten" Japan's security? No. Tokyo is defining "security" so expansively that almost anything China does can be fitted into its "threat" narrative.

That is a dangerous trend. History offers Japan an especially vivid warning. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Sept 18 Incident show how Japan fabricated "threats" and then made them pretexts for escalation and aggression. The lesson is not that history repeats mechanically. It is that manufactured perceptions of "danger" can become politically useful — and therefore extraordinarily dangerous.

Japan's future need not follow that script. But the more Tokyo expands its military apparatus, restricts economic ties, rewrites historical memory and treats ordinary Chinese activities as potential military operations, the more urgently the world should ask where that leads.

The tragedy of history is that countries rarely announce when they have crossed the line of reason. They simply keep moving it till it no longer serves its purpose.