By Zhong Sheng
A set of data recently released by the Japanese government is deeply troubling: driven by the government's policy of strengthening defense capabilities, the value of machinery manufacturing orders placed by Japan's Ministry of Defense reached nearly 2.69 trillion yen in 2025, nearly tripling over the past five years and accounting for nearly half of government public procurement orders in the same year.
Among these orders, those for weapons and equipment such as surface-to-air missiles and aircraft saw particularly significant growth. This trend clearly indicates that Japan's military-industrial complex has been reactivated. It is the inevitable result of Japan's right-wing forces deliberately and systematically breaking through the postwar peace framework and providing targeted support for the military industry. This development warrants close vigilance from peace-loving people around the world, including the Japanese people.
History offers a stark warning. Before WWII, Japan's military-industrial complex, an interest chain composed of the military, zaibatsu conglomerates, and the defense industry, was deeply embedded in the national economy, influencing decision-making and driving the war machine. Zaibatsu groups such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Kawasaki promoted military expansion through political lobbying, plundered resources from colonies, and used forced labor, building capital accumulation on the suffering of people in occupied countries. History has shown that Japan's military-industrial capital, once freed from institutional constraints, inherently carried expansionist, profit-driven, and war-inciting tendencies.
For this very reason, the international community after World War II, through legally binding documents such as the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation, and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, explicitly stipulated that Japan should be completely disarmed and not maintain such industries as would enable the country to re-arm for war. The Constitution of Japan after WWII also imposes strict restrictions on the country's military forces and right of belligerency, establishing the "exclusively defense-oriented" principle. This institutional framework severs the link between military-industrial capital and the machinery of state warfare. It has served as an important cornerstone for maintaining lasting peace and stability in Northeast Asia and also represents an international legal obligation and a bottom line of peace that Japan must uphold.
However, in recent years, Japanese right-wing forces have continuously loosened restrictions and provided support to the defense industry through increased fiscal spending, institutional backing and the relaxation of export controls. Senior officials have even promoted arms exports internationally, seeking to turn the defense industry into a pillar of the national economy. Budgets that should have been used to improve people's livelihoods are instead being spent on military procurement, while production lines that once manufactured household appliances are being used to produce lethal weapons. The one-way flow of public resources toward military-industrial interests fully exposes the serious distortion of Japan's public policy.
Right-wing politicians and defense industry groups have joined hands in pursuing profits, accelerating the shift of Japan's security policy toward greater militarization. Their ambition for remilitarization has become increasingly evident. Right-wing forces represented by Sanae Takaichi have continued to play up external threats and stoke security anxieties, creating public opinion cover for military expansion. Meanwhile, military-industrial interests, in pursuit of high profits, have continuously pushed the government to break through the constraints of the postwar system.
From promoting the amendment of the Constitution and the three national security documents, to accelerating the deployment of medium- and long-range offensive missiles, and further to easing restrictions on the export of lethal weapons and establishing a national intelligence agency, a series of aggressive moves have crossed one red line after another. Japan's defense budget for fiscal year 2026 has exceeded 9 trillion yen, setting a new record for the 14th consecutive year. Defense spending as a share of gross domestic product has risen to 2% and could increase further. From "exclusively defense-oriented" principle to sustained war-fighting capability, from projecting military influence overseas to expanding into space, Japan is in substance moving away from its postwar peace commitments and going further down the dangerous path of neo-militarism.
The danger of Japan's military-industrial complex lies not only in producing weapons, but also in creating demand for weapons; not only in serving military expansion, but also in driving it. Once such a self-reinforcing and accelerating cycle of interests takes shape, it will inevitably push Japan further down the path of remilitarization. What it undermines is the postwar peace order secured through the enormous sacrifices of peoples around the world, and it will ultimately push Japan itself toward a disastrous path. The international community must remain highly vigilant, resolutely curb Japan's neo-militarism, and firmly safeguard regional peace and stability as well as international fairness and justice.