By Li Daguang
From making erroneous remarks on the Taiwan question, to promoting missile deployments on sensitive islands and seeking to revise the Three Non-Nuclear Principles, and even declaring on December 1 that Japan is ready to serve as a forerunner for NATO's Asia-Pacific expansion, the series of words and deeds by Sanae Takaichi and her cabinet reveal a clear ideological foundation of "new militarism."
Looking back to 1993, after Sanae Takaichi was elected to the National Diet of Japan, she not only paid visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where Class-A war criminals are enshrined, for ten consecutive years, attempting to spiritually justify militarism, but also openly distorted history. She clamored that Japanese history textbooks were overly "masochistic," described Japan's war of aggression against China as a so-called self-defense war, and repeatedly made extremely erroneous remarks aimed at glorifying and denying the history of aggression. All these actions laid the ideological groundwork for ending Japan's "apology diplomacy."
In the realm of ideological education, Takaichi supports right-wing efforts to distort school textbooks and advocates bringing the Imperial Rescript on Education back into the classroom—an attempt to revive militarist values before WWII and reinforce a nationalist "patriotic" ideology. In the field of military and security policy, Takaichi shows a strong obsession with military expansion and war preparedness. She vigorously pushes for constitutional revision to strengthen Japan's armed forces, seeks to rename the Self-Defense Forces as a National Defense Forces, and aims to grant Japan the so-called right of collective self-defense and even the right to declare war.
After taking office, Takaichi made clear that the revision of the three national security documents would be brought forward from the originally planned 2027 timeline to the end of 2026. Her initiative to revise Article 9 of the Constitution attempts to explicitly define the Self-Defense Forces as a military, thus paving the way for Japan to regain legitimate possession of war-fighting capabilities. In terms of defense spending, Japan's defense budget has increased for ten consecutive years. For fiscal year 2026, the defense budget is set to surge to 8.85 trillion yen (approximately USD 56.7 billion). Moreover, the goal of raising defense expenditures to 2% of GDP, originally planned for fiscal year 2027, has now been moved forward to fiscal year 2025.
Takaichi's "new militarism" is also reflected in an explicit military orientation, placing the military at the center and treating war preparedness as the ultimate objective. At present, the Japanese government is actively developing long-range strike capabilities, including plans to purchase 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 1,600 kilometers from the US, as well as independently developing hypersonic missiles and other offensive weapons. The operational radius of these systems far exceeds the requirements of Japan's so-called "exclusively defense-oriented" policy. Japan also plans to build more than one hundred new ammunition depots to store long-range missiles with ranges of several thousand kilometers. Today, Japan is shifting from a self-proclaimed "peaceful nation" into a country that poses a military threat to the region and the world.
Sanae Takaichi's phone call with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on December 1, in which she pledged to advance bilateral cooperation, could trigger a chain reaction among other regional military forces. It may even further intensify already sensitive flashpoints such as the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, allowing the shadow of a "new Cold War" to loom over East Asia and undermining the interests of many countries in the region.
A Japanese prime minister who seeks to draw every aspect of national politics, the economy, the legal system, and education into a war-oriented framework is profoundly dangerous. A Japanese prime minister who attempts to bring military blocs out of the region into the Asia-Pacific is both reprehensible and dangerous. Today, reaffirming the imperative of preventing the resurgence of Japanese militarism and the rise of "new militarism" carries unmistakable and urgent real-world relevance.
(The author is a scholar of international affairs.)
Editor's note: Originally published on huanqiu.com, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.