Japan's defence minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, rejected China's charge that Tokyo is sliding into “new militarism” on Sunday, using a security summit in Singapore to accuse Beijing of expanding its military power too quickly and without enough openness. He said Japan would go forward “with a high degree of transparency” and keep talking to other countries as it strengthens its own forces.
Koizumi spoke on the last day of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a forum where Asian and Western officials often test one another's red lines in public. His remarks landed at a moment when the region is already watching a sharper security mood, and the exchange gives Japan's defence policy a far more visible stage than the budget debates in Tokyo usually do.
The immediate trigger was a pre-summit warning from China's defence ministry spokesman, Jiang Bin, who said “the grey rhino of a remilitarised Japan is gathering speed” and urged the international community to “work together to contain Japan's neo-militarism.” Koizumi answered that Japan was not engaged in “new militarism,” saying it was natural for countries to update their defences for new threats and to help preserve peace in the region. He added that Japan had neither nuclear weapons nor strategic bombers, even as China possesses a huge arsenal of both.
Koizumi also went on the offensive over China's own military spending. He said China continues to raise defence spending at a high level and is rapidly expanding capabilities across a wide range of areas without sufficient transparency. China's external approach and military activity, he said, are matters of serious concern for Japan and for the wider international community. A representative of the Chinese military then pressed him on whether Japan would apologise to victims in China, South Korea and South East Asia for World War Two.
The dispute sits on top of a longer pattern that neither side can escape. Japan has been steadily increasing defence spending for 12 consecutive years, and its latest budget, approved in December by the cabinet, was more than 9 trillion yen, or about $57bn, as Tokyo moves closer to a target of spending 2% of GDP on the military. Japan says it does not want war and only wants to bolster its defences, but Beijing's language and Koizumi's blunt reply show how quickly that explanation now runs into the history of Japan's invasion of China during World War Two.
What happens next is not yet clear, and that is the point. Neither side left Singapore with a new diplomatic step to calm the language, which means the next move may come not in a formal statement but in another speech, another budget, or another military signal that forces the other side to answer back.
