Is our current moment another 1930s?

On December 16, the Japanese Cabinet approved three defense documents, namely the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Program Guidelines and the Mid-Term Defense Program, referring to China as its "biggest strategic challenge".

By inciting the "China threat" intentionally, Japan aims to overturn its postwar pacifist defense strategy and rearm its Self-Defense Force with one of the world's largest military budgets. The Japan Self-Defense Force is already one of the world's finest military forces, which makes "self-defense" a concept in name-only.

Japan will spend 43 trillion yen ($313 billion) in the next five years to strengthen its military, buying cruise missiles capable of striking China and developing hypersonic weapons, among others. Japan is doubling its defense budget to roughly 2 percent of GDP from the 1 percent that Japan has maintained for the past 60 years.

The move represents a significant departure from its postwar pacifist Constitution and a serious violation of the spirit of four political documents between China and Japan.

Rewriting Japan's history and pacifist Constitution compromises Japan's global credibility

The key to postwar peace in East Asia is a demilitarized Japan, governed by the pacifist Constitution, which prohibits Japan from possessing "war potential", including its Self-Defence Forces. Showa Japan, from 1926 to 1989, lost and recovered from the second world war and grew into the world's second-largest economy and a pacifist country, followed by Heisei Japan that encountered a bubble burst, economic stagnation and reviving militarism.

Recent decades have seen Japanese right-wing political forces fighting to revise its pacifist Constitution to give its Self-Defence Forces a solid legal footing, remove post-war constraints to participate in military endeavors with allies and export defensive weapons. Efforts have also been made to gloss over ugly parts of Japan's colonial and wartime past and purge whatever materials seen as "masochistic" from textbooks.

Over time Japanese right-wing political figures have regularly paid respect at Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine, the notorious site regarded as a symbol of past Japanese militarism honoring a number of convicted Japanese war criminals among other WWII dead.

Those widely charged nationalist practices have severely frayed relations with its neighbors and former colonies, stoked needless tensions, dented its global credibility, and been reviled by many who want to keep the country's pacifist Constitution unchanged.

Reviving militarism and colonialism threats or coerces its neighbors

Japan's new militarism has taken shape in recent years, committed to boosting its Self-Defense Forces, reinforcing its USA-Japan military alliance, and deepening its security relations in Asia and beyond, especially the Quadrilaeral Security Dialogue (Quad).

The assassinated Japanese former prime minister Shinzo Abe was among the most prominent right-wing political figures. To help the distracted and vacillated America forge and materialize it's geopolitical strategic shift of "Pivot to Asia", Mr. Abe seeded the idea of a "free and open Indo-Pacific", now at the conceptual heart of America's grand strategy in Asia, and led the formation of the Quad envisaging Japan, India, Australia and the US , an equivalent military alliance.

Mr. Abe flirted with western values of "freedom, the rule of law, and the market economy, free from force or coercion, and ... prosperous", but the regional architecture is not "free and open", but for four countries only. More specifically, it is a geopolitical setting to divide Asia and jeopardizes Asian solidarity.

To counterbalance China geopolitically, Japanese right-wing political forces have used any excuse it could to play up the "China threat" in recent decades, so as to rearm itself at an alarming rate.

In April 2022 Mr. Abe became the first former leader of a major nation to provoke China over Taiwan, by openly proposing that Washington should abandon its longstanding policy of "strategic ambiguity" and be committed to defending Taiwan in case of a Chinese attack.

Japanese right-wing political figures hold such arguments as "if something happens to Taiwan, it means something happens to Japan." What they did has seriously violated the one-China principle and damaged the political foundation of China-Japan relations and the basic trust between the two countries.

On August 21, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper reported that Tokyo is considering the deployment of more than 1,000 long-range cruise missiles to strike China's coastal areas.

Economically, while it is free for any country to choose its own development path, Japanese politicians such as Mr. Abe have frequently criticized Beijing's development model as "authoritarian" and "statist" and its "Belt and Road Initiative".

In September 2022, Japan honored Mr. Abe with a rare state funeral, which reflects Japanese authority to stick to the course Mr. Abe has set and security policies he has championed.

New militarism could rob Japan of a brighter future

Japan's old militarism conducted aggression and expansion, committed crimes against humanity, and brought serious disasters to our region and to the world in the 1930-40s. Nothing is more ominous than an arms buildup in Japan. Japan's new militarism has once again posed an existential challenge to its Asian neighbors.

Japan's new militarism is jointly driven by the US and Japanese right-wing political forces where the US has long pushed Tokyo to increase its defense spending and take a greater role in supporting US military operations in East Asia while Japanese right-wing political forces wish to tap into America's strategic interests in the region to contain China.

It is the US and Japanese right-wing political forces that kidnap the country, put a normally retiring Japan at the forefront of efforts to contain China, and could rob the country of a brighter future.

With new militarism, Reiwa Japan aims to be on the global front line, putting its starting place on China, however containing China leads Japan to no way.

As Japan gets more and more militarily capable and assertive, there is no time left for Japan's neighbors and former colonies to heal themselves from Japan's terrible wartime invasion and colonization. To prevent Japan from wrecking an open, international order that for decades had by and large guaranteed East Asian peace and prosperity, the only thing that countries in the region can do is make sure they are prepared mentally and physically for what might be coming ahead and act in unison.

Huang Yongfu is an economic affairs commentator. After earning a PhD, he started his career at the University of Cambridge and then moved on to the UN system. His current interests lie in global development and Sino-US links. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of China Daily.

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