Japanese See Threat in Soviet Pacific Buildup

The Japan Defense Agency, fearing that a new mood of Soviet-American detente will pressure Japan to reduce its defense budget, warned today that the Soviet Union is continuing a buildup of its naval and air forces in the Pacific, “increasing the potential threat to our country.”

The agency, in a white paper approved by Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita’s Cabinet, said the Soviet Union “is deploying powerful military forces around Japan (and is carrying out) a consistent buildup in qualitative and quantitative terms.”

Osamu Sairenji, Defense Agency counselor, told foreign correspondents that even though the United States and the Soviet Union have signed a treaty that calls for the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the Soviets have increased the size of their naval and air forces in the Far East in the last year.

Warmer relations between the United States, which is allied with Japan under a security treaty, and the Soviet Union already have led to calls in Japan for reducing the annual increase in its defense budget, which in recent years has exceeded 5%.

Meet 1976 Goals

Sairenji said the Defense Agency is emphasizing the continuing Soviet threat in order to bolster domestic support for a 1976 military buildup plan that has yet to achieve its goals. The plan fixed numerical levels of forces for peacetime defense that should have been achieved 12 years ago. The government has promised to achieve the long-delayed goals by March 31, 1991.

Even if the United States and the Soviet Union agree on future reductions in both nuclear and conventional forces, Sairenji said, Japan should continue to increase its military spending until the 1976 goals are achieved.

“The 1976 outline spells out what should exist as a minimum force in peacetime,” he said.

However, Sairenji said Japan would reject any U.S. demand for a sharp increase in the sharing of the burden now borne by 50,400 U.S. troops stationed in Japan. There is “a big gap,” he said, between the thinking of the Defense Agency and that of the U.S. Congress in terms of what Japan can do to alleviate the U.S. military burden.

Japan’s constitution and long years of adherence to a political limit on defense spending of 1% of the gross national product mean, he said, that “we can’t expand defense spending dramatically.”

“Drastic change is impossible,” he said.

The 1% limit was lifted in 1987 but still has not been exceeded. Last year the defense budget was 0.9993% of the gross national product. This year’s defense budget of 3.7 trillion yen, or $28.7 billion, was expected to be 1.013% of the GNP when the budget was approved last December. But economic growth is outstripping the government’s initial estimate, making it likely that the defense budget will again fall below the 1% level.

For fiscal 1989, the government has given the Defense Agency approval to request a budget increase of 6.1% to $30 billion.