[LINK] "Japan is worried about China, but the U.S. may not be able to help them"

[rfmcdonald]

Michael Den Tandt's National Post opinion piece notes the vulnerability of the Japanese-American alliance.

Modern Japan is a country steeped in pacifism, whose people are deeply ambivalent about the plan by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party to further relax strict constitutional limits on the military that were imposed by the American occupiers after the Second World War. The U.S., ironically, would like nothing better than to see the Japan Self-Defence Forces become more assertive.

Although there’s growing popular worry here about Chinese naval and aerial incursions in the East China seas, polls show, it has not yet translated into broad support for Abe, whose party faces a pivotal vote in Japan’s upper house in July. Amending Japan’s constitution would require a super-majority of two-thirds in both houses. The constitution has remained unaltered since it came into force in 1946.

Like Canada, Japan spends less than one per cent of its Gross Domestic Product on Defence — about 4.86 trillion yen for the fiscal year beginning in April, or about $56.6 billion. Though the Abe government is gradually increasing its defence budget year over year at about 0.8 per cent on average, this is still below the spending of a decade ago.

Yet the Japanese military is now routinely on point, addressing incursions by a determined strategic adversary. In 2013, China unilaterally extended its Air Defence Identification Zone southward and eastward to include the Senkaku Islands, which lie in Okinawa Prefecture, southwest of Japan’s main islands, and have been under Japanese control for more than a century. Intrusions by Chinese ships spiked during the ensuing controversy, then dropped in 2014 amid intense diplomatic efforts. But scrambles of Japanese jets in response to Chinese air incursions, according to data provided by Japanese defence ministry officials, have risen from 306 in 2012 to 464 in 2014, and 373 in just the first nine months of fiscal 2015.

Never in Japan’s postwar history, therefore, has its alliance with the United States been so critical to its security. That alliance is cemented primarily by American air power based on the island of Okinawa.

But Okinawans, while generally accepting the need for a Japan-U.S. defence pact, are increasingly demanding at least some of the bases — which consume almost a fifth of the prefecture’s land area — be moved elsewhere.