Kerosene on Japan’s Arms Debate : Nationalist Views on Defense Are Fed by Our FSX Quibbling
Is the FSX issue over except for the congressional shouting? Not at all. The Japanese must soon decide what to do about the engine for the proposed military jetcraft. A former member of the Japanese Cabinet is willing to consider buying it from the Soviets.
This view is extreme and receives no support, in part because the Soviets make a bad engine. More pertinent are two other questions: Should Japan produce its own weapons? Or should Japan rely on its military ally, the United States, for its supply? The Japanese defense community has silently fought over these questions since the early 1970s. This battle shows two contending camps: the nationalists and the internationalists.
The nationalists seek prestige. They are proud that Japan now has its own surface-to-ship missile, a trainer aircraft and a new tank. The internationalists want Japan’s defense to be non-threatening. They point out that none of these weapons project Japanese force beyond the home islands and coastal waters, nor may they be exported abroad. Informed Japanese observers saw the decision to develop the FSX jointly with the United States as an internationalists’ victory. But the U.S. decision to question this agreement will benefit the nationalists.
The nationalists can make good arguments why Japan should have its own arms industry. Japan has opted for small, high-tech military forces. The military forces’ effectiveness relies in part on the potential to produce weapons that are not in an adversary’s arsenal. As a matter of strategy, an island nation like Japan should try to reduce its reliance on imported weapons. And the arms industry creates jobs and technological spin-offs that can contribute to Japan’s competitiveness. The major argument, though, is political and emotional: Japan must have the ability to defend itself by itself. That is the base line to which the nationalists always return.
There are also good arguments why Japan should not develop an independent capacity to produce arms. When developed domestically, weapons take longer to produce and cost more to make than buying them off the shelf from the United States. The arms may be difficult to integrate into other weapons systems, which in Japan’s case are usually American-made. Japanese self-defense forces are still small and will only need a few weapons--not enough to provide the base of experience to make better weapons. Developing arms domestically does nothing to redress the tilting U.S.-Japan balance of trade and invites a dangerous confusion of trade and defense issues. These are all arguments that the internationalists have made.
Ultimately, the role of the United States as an ally has been the decisive factor in Japan’s internal debate over weapons development. Japan’s Asian neighbors and Japanese moderates have seen the rearmament of Japan as tolerable only so long as Japan is firmly tied by security treaty to the United States. Article III of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty calls on the two nations “individually and in cooperation with each other” to develop “their capacities to resist armed attack.” And Article IV calls on the two nations to “consult together” on how to do so. In short, the defense of Japan is a cooperative endeavor and this fact has been the unassailable pillar of the internationalists’ arguments.
Only once have the nationalists have been able to advance their arguments for kokusanka (domestic weapons development) to the level of official policy. This was in the early 1970s after President Richard M. Nixon’s “Guam Doctrine” caused a crisis of confidence in Tokyo regarding America’s commitment to the defense of Japan. Pressure from the United States and China eventually killed the kokusanka doctrine. The internationalists then established a long-term defense outline to ensure that Japan’s future defense debate be defined within the context of the security treaty.
As a result, the defense debate in Japan has matured. In the 1980s a consensus has developed throughout the majority party, the bureaucracy and even the media that Japan’s self-defense forces can contribute to a more stable world. This consensus has allowed the government to break its earlier policy of keeping defense spending within 1% of the gross nationalproduct and to refer to Japan as a member of the Western Alliance--actions unthinkable only a few years ago.
But there still is no consensus over the question of arms development. This debate lies smoldering where it was dropped in the early 1970s. And America is about to pour kerosene on it.
The Bush Administration is correct to integrate economic and security considerations in arms deals such as FSX. But we are coming close to sending two dangerous messages to Japan: that Japan’s defense is subordinate to a larger trade problem and that Japan should not expect access to our most advanced technology even for its defense. We should think hard about whether or not this is what we really mean.
