JAPAN INCREASING ITS DEFENCE BUDGET

1. Context

2. What does Japan's Constitution say?

• Article 9 of Japan's Constitution states that the Japanese people forever renounce war as a Sovereign right of the nation and the threat and use of force to settle international disputes.
• It also states that the country would never sustain land, sea and air forces with war potential.
• The Constitution was introduced when Japan was occupied by U.S. forces, but Japan's different political sections backed pacifism for decades.
• Instead of a regular army, the country maintained Japan Self Defence Forces, with offensive weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear arms strictly banned.
• In 2014, Japan's government reinterpreted Article 9 and gave more powers to the forces-they can now come to the defence of allies if they were attacked.
• The Diet, Japan's Parliament, later passed a series of legislation codifying the reinterpretation. Now, the LDP, under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, is pushing for increased spending on research and defence Production.

3. LDP's Proposal

• For the fiscal year 2023, the government has already raised the defence budget to its highest level-six trillion yen ($43 billion) or more than 1% of the World's third-largest GDP.
• The LDP wants this to be doubled in five years as the geopolitical and regional risks the country is facing are rising. The Ministry of Defence is now planning to achieve "counter-attack capability".
• As part of the proposals, Japan will begin mass producing surface-to-ship missiles, a domestically developed cruise missile with a range of over 1,000 km (Which can hit both China and North Korea, even though it's not clear What Japanese law says about hitting targets inside another country) and high-speed glide missiles.
• Japan plans to deploy these weapons in 2026. The budget has allocated research and development funds for hypersonic guided missiles, which are five times faster than the speed of sound.
• Japan is also developing a new fighter jet-F.X. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is designing the jet on which Japan has already spent more than 200 billion yen.

4. What Triggered the Change in Policy?

• The rapid rise of China and the growing militarization of North Korea were already strengthening the nationalist sections within Japan. Japan, which occupied the whole of the Korean Peninsula and parts of China before the Second World War and had committed unspeakable crimes in its colonies, still has a testy relationship with China and the two Koreas.
• Recently, a missile launched by North Korea flew over Japan and an ICBM fell to near its territorial waters.
• Besides China and North Korea, Russia's invasion of Ukraine also seems to have influenced Japan's thinking.
• Japan and Russia, which fought a disastrous war in 1904-05, have disputes over the ownership of the Kuril Islands that separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean.
• From Japan's point of view, western military guarantees to Ukraine did not stop Russia from invading its neighbouring country.
• The obvious question Japan's policymakers face is whether the security guarantees from the U.S. is enough to deter threats from a highly securitised neighbourhood where there are three nuclear powers-China, North Korea and Russia.
• In the past, any bid to move away from pacifism would attract public criticism, but the changing regional situation is altering Japan's domestic mood as well.
• A recent poll suggested that more than half of the Japanese public support raising the defence budget.

For Prelims & Mains