This sun-baked airfield was built atop Okinawa’s rocky coral by Americans during the Cold War, but these days its roaring jets proudly display the red sun of Japan.
The Japanese F-15 fighters are engaged in an increasingly busy, and at times tense, game of cat-and-mouse with rapidly modernizing China, just across the East China Sea. The pilots say they face intrusions into Japanese-controlled air space by an array of increasingly sophisticated Chinese aircraft, including advanced fighters like the Russian-made Su-27.
“You cannot let down your guard when you fly up against an Su-27,” said Major General Masashi Yamada, commander of Naha’s squadron of 24 fighters.
Yamada will soon get additional help. In December, Tokyo announced plans to strengthen its forces in the Okinawan islands, including adding a dozen F-15s in Naha. The increase is part of a broader shift in Japanese defensive stance southward, toward China, that some analysts are calling one of Japan’s biggest changes in postwar military strategy.
This strategic shift is another step in a gradual and limited buildup of Japan’s forces, aimed at keeping up with the changing power balance in Asia. Political analysts say Japan is slowly raising the capabilities of its forces to respond to a more assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea — and to take a first, halting step out of the shadow of the US, its postwar protector, which many Japanese fear may one day no longer have the will or ability to defend Japan.
“This is all part of an agonizing soul-searching by Japan,” said Yuichi Hosoya, a professor of international politics at Keio University in Tokyo. “Japan feels itself caught between the reality of Chinese power and questions about US commitments in East Asia.”
Political analysts are quick to point out that this is not a full-blown military buildup by Japan, whose pacifist Constitution constrains it to purely defensive forces. They say there is not strong public support for changing the Constitution to allow a full-fledged military.
The increases are also limited by Japan’s own economic weakening: Its military spending has been shrinking for the past decade along with the size of its overall economy. Japan’s defense budget has decreased 5.2 percent since 2001 to ¥4.68 trillion (US$56.4 billion), though it is still estimated to be one of the five or six largest in the world. To pay for its planned strengthening in the south, Tokyo will cut hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces in the north, and slightly reduce Japan’s current number of 155,000 ground troops.
Given its limits, Japan’s strategy for now appears for it to become a fuller military partner of the US. Japanese planners now speak of a division of labor between the two militaries, in which a more robust Japan carries a greater load in areas like anti-submarine warfare, freeing up the Americans to focus elsewhere. The December guidelines also call for “integrating” Japanese and US forces by sharing command centers and intelligence.
Analysts say Tokyo seeks to bind the two militaries together in order to keep the US engaged in east Asia, and from becoming too distracted by its financial crisis and war in Afghanistan.
Analysts say one goal of Japan’s new strategy is to make its military a more visible presence, to discourage China from trying to extend its reach into waters now controlled by Japan. While Japan has one of most sophisticated militaries in Asia, and the region’s most respected navy, it has long been careful to keep its euphemistically named Self-Defense Forces largely out of sight to avoid threatening neighbors.
For now, at least some of its neighbors appear willing to accept a larger Japanese military presence. The new Japanese strategy received very little opposition in South Korea, which analysts say now sees China, and also North Korea, as bigger threats than Japan. In fact, South Korea and Japan are negotiating their first military cooperation agreements since Japan’s colonial rule ended in 1945.
“If anything, we now need a stronger Japan to maintain the regional security balance,” said Park Young-june, a Japanese security expert at the Korea National Defense University in Seoul.
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