'Gray rhino' of Japan's remilitarization is wildly charging over regional order: China Daily editorial

There is something revealing about the debate now convulsing Japan's ruling establishment over whether China should formally be called a "threat" in the drafting of the country's new security documents that are scheduled to be deliberated next month.

Tokyo's political class already behaves as though China is a "threat". The unresolved question is whether Japan is ready to say aloud what its policies already presume.

Officially, the Sanae Takaichi government still speaks the language of a "strategic relationship of mutual benefit" with Beijing. Japanese diplomats continue to invoke the old formula of pursuing a "constructive and stable relationship" with China. Takaichi herself insists she is trying to keep the channels of dialogue "open".

Yet governments are judged by budgets, deployments, doctrines and alliances. And on that score, Japan's trajectory does not accord with its words.

Worse, Tokyo even attempts to hold Beijing accountable for tensions in bilateral relations that are, in fact, of its own making.

Against that backdrop, the current dispute inside the Liberal Democratic Party over whether China should be labeled a "threat" resembles less a substantive policy disagreement than an exercise in political cosmetics. In 2022, Japan's National Security Strategy already described China as "the greatest strategic challenge" Japan has ever faced. In its Diplomatic Bluebook released in April, the Japanese government effectively downgraded China-Japan relations.

But the more important reality is that Tokyo's conduct has long since outrun its rhetoric.

That is why the supposedly "moderate" voices inside the Japanese establishment deserve closer scrutiny. Those warning against provocative wording targeting China might not be voicing rationality. Their concern may be with avoiding a backlash that could complicate Japan's advancing of its neo-militarism.

In other words, they object not to the destination, but to the visibility of the journey. This matters because Japan has traveled this road before.

The parallels with the ideological evolution of Japanese militarism in history are difficult to ignore. Japan's descent into catastrophe did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It started much earlier — with the gradual fusion of nationalism, historical mythmaking, elite insecurity and militarized politics. Today's rhetoric is simply old wine in a new bottle.

After all, the Takaichi government has already expanded offensive military capabilities, promoted missile cooperation abroad, relaxed arms-export rules and openly discussed preparedness for a prolonged "emergency", including setting up a centralized, prime-minister-led command hub for intelligence gathering and analysis. Japanese officials are now pushing for restoring wartime-style military ranks inside the Self-Defense Forces.

Viewed collectively, these moves reveal something larger: the erosion of Japan's postwar system that emerged from the ashes of Japanese imperialism. That is precisely why the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Trials — which fell on May 3 this year — matters.

The tribunal's significance was never confined to punishing individual war criminals such as Hideki Tojo. Its deeper purpose was to delegitimize the ideological machinery that had enabled militarism itself: emperor absolutism, historical revisionism, expansionist nationalism and the mythology of victimhood.

The pattern of the Takaichi government's fomenting of neo-militarism is historically familiar: cultivate fear, centralize authority, glorify sacrifice, exaggerate external threats and redefine expansion as self-defense.

In history, Japan's invasion of its neighbors obstructed the region's development; today the right-wing forces in Japan again threaten the very order on which the Asia-Pacific has prospered after the war. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun warned on Tuesday, the "gray rhino" of Japan's remilitarization is charging straight toward the region.

The right-wing forces in Japan shamelessly portray the nation not as a historical aggressor requiring vigilance, but as a perpetually endangered "democracy" forced into reluctant militarization by "hostile neighbors". That narrative inversion — aggressor recast as victim — is central to their obfuscation of intent. The danger for Japan is therefore not primarily external but from within: the erosion of historical memory, the normalization of ideological nationalism and the steady abandonment of postwar restraint in favor of the romanticism of assertive "self-defense".

History rarely repeats itself precisely. But nations that convince themselves they have transcended history and therefore no longer need to reflect on it are often the ones most vulnerable to reenacting it.