After decades of gradual military build-up by China, territorial disputes with China and Russia, and increasing concern about North Korea’s missile-strike capability, Japan is once again reinventing itself and rapidly moving from the pacifist stance it has embraced since the end of World War II. Recent geostrategic instability has also accelerated this shift. It is central to US plans in the Indo-Pacific to retain the strategic advantage by bringing Japan and Australia into a deeper interoperable trilateral relationship—the northern and southern anchors for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The Japanese government has embraced this and has been unusually frank about its desire to lift military cooperation with Australia to unprecedented levels in coming years. There’s also a growing interest in adding new layers to the defence and security relationship, including in defence industry cooperation; research on and development of critical and emerging technologies; and cooperation in cybersecurity, energy security and renewables.

The Australian Defence Force and the Japan Self-Defense Forces have developed an impressive series of exercises that are now second only to Australia’s exercises with the US as far as depth and frequency go. This is very encouraging and important to help build interoperability, trust and people-to-people connections. Australia’s defence and national security ‘Japan watchers’ (unfortunately still a small group) will agree that this level of cooperation and engagement was unthinkable even just a decade ago—a short time in international relationship development.

Things are moving in the right direction and the policy and technical foundations have been laid, most recently with the signing of the Australia–Japan reciprocal access agreement. The agreement is important for increasing training and exercising between the JSDF and the ADF and could enable the JSDF to conduct unilateral training in Australia. It complements other arrangements between the two countries, such as the sharing of classified information and the reciprocal provision of supplies and services for exercises and training, UN peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, and transportation of nationals and others in overseas exigencies.

Since the end of World War II, peacetime for Japan and a pacifist constitution have meant that the JSDF hasn’t engaged in actual warfighting for almost 80 years. That’s a long time for a military not to have the experience to help hone its tactics, techniques and procedures; for officers to develop battle experience and leadership; for soldiers to develop skills and combat techniques and to test equipment; and for the government to manage public reaction to personnel being involved in a conflict.

The JSDF has been involved in various peacekeeping, capacity-building and humanitarian missions, including with the ADF in Iraq from 2004 to 2006. However, as any military expert will tell you, this is not the same, and the JSDF now urgently needs to increase its combined-arms training. Training and multinational experience are mandatory for success in a rapidly deteriorating Indo-Pacific.

The Northern Territory offers arguably the best location in the region to meet the JSDF’s training needs. There are alternative training sites on the US mainland; however, most experts agree that they don’t offer the unique characteristics found at training areas in the Northern Territory. No other location offers the opportunities for multi-domain training across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace available in the Northern Territory.

The territory has four key training areas that are already used for a range of annual training serials between the ADF and the US military—primarily the US marines and air force. The hard infrastructure at the heart of this hub are the Bradshaw and Delamere training ranges, which together form one of the largest training areas in the world. Bradshaw, for example, is almost three times the size of the US Army National Training Center and more than three and a half times as big as the US Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center. The ranges are in sparsely populated areas, are close to Asia and potential future areas of operations, and have no commercial overflight and therefore no altitude restrictions for aircraft and long-range rockets. They also have little to no electromagnetic interference, which helps with testing sensors, electronic-warfare capabilities and next-generation platforms.

In addition to supporting the JSDF’s training requirements, there’s great potential to deepen the Australia–Japan–US relationship and develop a multinational amphibious unit based in the Northern Territory. Given the US marines’ established presence in the Northern Territory, this is a natural next step. It would also be useful for coordinating with other regional partners and allies for amphibious training and in activities such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

It’s important that Australia capitalise on the momentum the reciprocal access agreement brings to its relationship with Japan by develop joint training opportunities in partnership with the JSDF.  The Australian government should be—and may well already be—providing Japan with specific proposals for getting the JSDF to Australia routinely and perhaps in the future a modest permanent presence embedded with the ADF (as with the US marines in Darwin).

In this growing and important defence relationship, an immediate practical step could be establishing a JSDF liaison office at Robertson Barracks in Darwin along with increasing JSDF secondments to other ADF units and at the ADF headquarters in Canberra. Longer term (but not too distant), the Australian government should develop a permanent Japan–Australia military training initiative in the Northern Territory along similar lines to the longstanding Australia–Singapore training initiative based in central and northern Queensland.

The training areas in Queensland are owned and managed by the Australian government, but Singapore has a significant investment in developing and enhancing them to help meet the future needs of the ADF and facilitate an increase in Singapore Armed Forces personnel training in Australia. When the initiative reaches maturity, up to 14,000 Singapore Armed Forces personnel will train in Queensland for up to a total of 18 weeks split into two nine-week periods each year. A similar arrangement could easily be established in the Top End.

There will be political and public-perception hurdles to overcome on both sides, but now is the time to be thinking boldly.

Since the dawn of international politics, smaller states have faced the formidable challenge of navigating great-power rivalries. Today, it is the geopolitical contest between the United States and China that has compelled countries to balance their competing national interests. Which side they gravitate towards depends on domestic and external circumstances.

Consider the Philippines, which has an interest in maintaining both its growing economic ties with neighbouring China as well as its half-century-old security alliance with the US. Former president Rodrigo Duterte placed greater emphasis on the economy, turning the Philippines sharply away from the US and towards China after his election in 2016.

In exchange for effectively siding with China in the escalating great-power competition, Duterte sought Chinese investment in his pet project—the ‘Build! Build! Build!’ infrastructure program—and moderation of China’s aggressive behaviour in the West Philippine Sea, particularly its seizure of islets and outcroppings claimed by the Philippines. But China didn’t oblige. When Duterte’s presidency ended last June, China had delivered less than 5% of the US$24 billion it had pledged to invest in the Philippines, and its provocations in the West Philippine Sea, which comprises part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, continued unabated.

Duterte’s successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, has so far taken a more prudent strategic approach. Deeply concerned about the territorial disputes fuelled by Chinese claims in the South China Sea, Marcos has decided to reaffirm and enhance his country’s partnership with the US.

To that end, the Philippines has decided to grant the US access to four more military bases—for a total of nine—some of which are located near disputed areas of the South China Sea. American troops rotate regularly through the designated bases. The US and the Philippines have also agreed to resume joint patrols in the South China Sea, which, under Duterte, were suspended for six years.

Beyond the US, the Philippines and Japan recently agreed to deepen defence ties, with Japanese troops securing greater access to Philippine territory for training and logistics. The Philippines is also pursuing greater maritime cooperation with the United Kingdom. The two countries held their inaugural maritime dialogue on 7 February. Two weeks later, the Philippine defence minister agreed with his Australian counterpart to formalise their ‘strategic’ defence engagement—potentially including joint patrols in the South China Sea.

So, the Philippines is gradually becoming a key hub of military cooperation among Southeast Asia’s democracies. This affords the US important strategic benefits—for which China has only itself to blame. China’s efforts to bully its neighbours into acquiescing to its demands and preferences have not only failed but have led to the emergence of a kind of anti-China coalition in the Indo-Pacific.

This has certainly been the case in South Korea. After the country agreed in 2016 to deploy a US THAAD missile-defence system on its territory—a response to escalating threats from North Korea—China imposed heavy economic sanctions. With that, public opinion in South Korea turned sharply against China. Measured on a scale of 1 (most negative) to 100 (most positive), South Korean sentiment towards China now stands at 26.4—two points less favourable than sentiment towards North Korea (28.6), according to a Hankook Research poll conducted in 2021.

Partly in response to public opinion, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, like Marcos, has sought to strengthen its alliance with the US. He is also working to improve long-strained relations with Japan, not least by announcing a plan to compensate Koreans who performed forced labour under Japanese colonial rule during World War II.

China’s aggressive sanctions against Australia—imposed in 2020 as punishment for the Australian government’s call for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19—spurred a similar foreign-policy reorientation. In September 2021, Australia formed an ‘enhanced security partnership’, known as AUKUS, with the US and the UK. And Australia, India, Japan and the US have sought to strengthen the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

All of these steps aim to bolster security, but they also carry risks. In his 1995 book Diplomacy, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that it was Imperial German leaders’ combination of ‘truculence’ and ‘indecisiveness’ that ‘hurled their country first into isolation and then into war’. In his view, World War I erupted partly because leaders were ‘swayed by the emotions of the moment and hampered by an extraordinary lack of sensitivity to foreign psyches’. A similar dynamic may be at play today.

Ensuring that the dark history of the 20th century doesn’t echo today will require sound judgement from both sides. China must recognise the fear it has incited with its bullying, and democracies across the Indo-Pacific must take care to ensure that their responses don’t heighten tensions excessively. Otherwise, we may well sleepwalk into catastrophe.

In December, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced the most ambitious expansion of military power in Japan since the creation of the country’s self-defence forces in 1954. Japanese defence spending will rise to 2% of GDP—twice the 1% level that has prevailed since 1976—and a new national security strategy lays out all the diplomatic, economic, technological and military instruments that Japan will use to protect itself in the years ahead.

Most notably, Japan will acquire the kind of long-range missiles that it had previously foresworn, and it will work with the United States to strengthen littoral defences around the ‘first island chain’ in the western Pacific. Last month in Washington, following Kishida’s diplomatic tour through several other G7 countries, he and US President Joe Biden pledged closer defence cooperation. Among the factors precipitating these changes are China’s increased assertiveness against Taiwan and, especially, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which reminded a new generation what military aggression looks like.

Of course, some of Japan’s neighbours worry that it will resume its militarist posture of the 1930s. When Kishida’s predecessor, Shinzo Abe, broadened the constitutional interpretation of self-defence to include collective undertakings with Japanese allies, he stoked concerns both within the region and from some segments of Japanese society.

But such alarmism can be reduced if one explains the full backstory. After World War II, militarism was deeply discredited within Japan, and not just because the US-imposed constitution restricted the Japanese military’s role to self-defence. During the Cold War, Japan’s security depended on cooperation with the US. When the Cold War ended in the 1990s, some analysts—in both countries—regarded the bilateral security treaty, in force since 1952, as a relic, and a Japanese commission was created to study whether Japan could do without it, such as by relying on the United Nations instead.

But the end of the Cold War did not mean that Japan no longer lived in a dangerous region. Its next-door neighbour is North Korea, whose unpredictable dictatorship has consistently invested the country’s meagre economic resources in nuclear and missile technology.

A much larger, longer-term concern is the rise of China, which surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy in 2010, and which disputes Japan’s control of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. To the north, a nuclear-armed Russia claims and controls territory that belonged to Japan before 1945. And on the economic front, Japan remains dependent on imports that travel through contested areas like the South China Sea. This is a persistent source of risk, because, unlike Europe after 1945, East Asia never benefited from full reconciliation between rivals or established strong regional institutions.

Faced with this situation, Japan has had four options for ensuring its security, only one of which has held much promise. Amending the pacifism out of its constitution and fully re-arming as a nuclear state would be costly, dangerous and lacks domestic support. At the same time, seeking neutrality and relying on the UN Charter would not provide adequate security, while forming an alliance with China would give the latter far too much influence over Japanese policy. Or, lastly, it could maintain its alliance with the distant superpower.

That alliance is by far the safest and most cost-effective option. But since Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016, some Japanese have worried about America turning to isolationism. Even in the early 1990s, when I was involved in renegotiating the terms of the US–Japan alliance at the end of the Cold War, high-ranking Japanese officials would ask me if the US might someday abandon Japan as China became stronger. Back then, many Americans regarded Japan as an economic threat, and many Japanese were open to a more UN-centred approach to ensuring their national security.

The situation changed with the Clinton administration’s 1995 East Asia strategy report, which invited greater Chinese participation in international affairs but also hedged against uncertainty by reinforcing the alliance with Japan. In 1996, the Clinton–Hashimoto Tokyo declaration made clear that the US–Japan security alliance was the foundation for post–Cold War stability in East Asia. Still, there were questions about the reliability of American guarantees, leading to discussions among US and Japanese security experts, who helped flesh out the principle of American ‘extended deterrence’.

The best security guarantee is the presence of US troops, which Japan helps to maintain with generous host-nation support. The new measures announced by Kishida and Biden in January are designed both to reinforce this guarantee and to provide insurance in the event that Trump or a Trump-like figure returns to the White House. Importantly, these measures do not give Japan’s neighbours any reason to fear that it has reacquired a taste for aggression. In fact, strengthening the US–Japan alliance is the best way to ensure that Japan never does.

For the past two decades, former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage and I have issued bipartisan reports on how to strengthen the US–Japan alliance. As one such report explains, ‘With the dynamic changes taking place throughout the Asia–Pacific, Japan will likely never have the same opportunity to help guide the fate of the region. In choosing leadership, Japan can secure her status as a tier-one nation and her necessary role as an equal partner in the alliance.’

In this context, Kishida’s recent actions can be seen as appropriate steps in the right direction. There is enormous potential for developing a more equal partnership and working with others in the provision of joint security. Doing so will be good for the US, good for Japan and good for the rest of the world. Recent events offer grounds for optimism about the future of the US–Japan alliance and stability in East Asia.

No one could have foreseen that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s popularity would nosedive so soon after the Liberal Democratic Party triumphed in July’s election to the Upper House of the Japanese Diet. Until recently, Kishida’s government received consistently high approval ratings. But the LDP’s links to a controversial religious group, along with the costly state funeral of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, have shaken Kishida’s political base, endangering Japan’s fragile economic recovery.

The two main causes of Kishida’s declining approval ratings are interrelated. After Abe was assassinated during a campaign event in Nara in July, news outlets reported that his killer had a personal vendetta against the Unification Church, the religious movement whose extensive connections to LDP lawmakers are now at the centre of a major political scandal. The LDP’s ties to the Unification Church and the controversy surrounding Abe’s state funeral have caused many to lose faith in the government.

Kishida’s unpopularity comes at a time when public trust is needed to fight inflation. That is bad news for Japan’s economy, which has recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic more slowly than most developed economies. Japan’s GDP returned to pre-pandemic levels in the first half of 2022,  a year later than the United States. And while the country’s consumer price index increased by more than 2% for five consecutive months—a steep rise by Japanese standards—aggregate demand remains too weak to allow the Bank of Japan to reverse the ultra-loose monetary policy it has maintained since Abe launched his economic program (dubbed ‘Abenomics’) in 2013.

As the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank hike interest rates to tame inflation, monetary-policy divergence has caused the yen to depreciate rapidly. Given the ongoing economic slowdown in the US and China—Japan’s two major trading partners—Japan must devise macroeconomic policies aimed at boosting demand. Japanese policymakers should also press employers to raise wages in line with inflation, as Kishida has done several times, especially in the elderly care, childcare and education industries, where the public sector’s presence is predominant.

The core problem lies in Japan’s peculiar and conservative inflation expectations, the formation of which prevents the inflation rate from rising. To mitigate this, policymakers should build a strategy to change the public’s mindset, for example, by generating positive narratives about the economy under reasonable inflation. Slow wage increases and near-deflation have sustained decades of economic stagnation. Now is the time to change course.

Given that Abe-era structural reforms—the ‘third arrow’ of Abenomics—have failed to boost economic growth, Japanese policymakers must implement more effective pro-growth policies. To this end, they should establish a credible government mechanism to sustain reform momentum, as a prominent business group suggested in August, and to mandate continuous improvement of enacted policies, based on monitoring of their impact.

Steering the Japanese economy through the current global turmoil requires wisdom and courage. Unfortunately, both are in short supply. After his election last year, Kishida was expected to collaborate with Abe, the leader of the LDP’s largest faction, on his economic agenda. But Abe’s sudden death has created a crippling political vacuum. Kishida’s passive leadership style is not helping, and Japan’s bureaucracy—which is still entrusted with the actual policymaking—is not in a position to lead. Simply put, Japan’s leaders appear unwilling to take the bold steps the country needs.

This was not always the case. In the 1950s, national industrial policy played an important role in lifting Japan’s economy from wartime ruin to global prominence. In the 1980s and 1990s, government support helped the country to muddle through a trade war with the US. During the administrations of Abe and his successor Yoshihide Suga, the prime minister’s office imposed its will on many ministries, even intervening in their executive appointments. Overwhelmed by this exercise of power, it became the norm for several high-level officials to follow the direction of their political seniors, regardless of policy merit.

Kishida, by contrast, has given ministries greater leeway. But his administration has also exposed the bureaucracy to pressure from the LDP’s backbench politicians, who are often lobbied by vested interests. Civil servants are also constantly bullied by opposition politicians who try to score political points by bombarding them with often trivial questions during Diet sessions.

Fed up with their managers’ excessive deference to politicians and feeling underappreciated, younger government officials are increasingly quitting public service. According to the National Personnel Authority of the Government of Japan, the number of people who left elite jobs after 10 years of service increased by 43% between 2013 and 2020. Whereas prestigious universities once served as recruitment channels for prospective government employees, the number of University of Tokyo students who passed the entrance exam for elite public-service jobs has declined by nearly half over the past decade.

So, what can Kishida do to regain public trust? For starters, he could dissolve the Lower House of the Japanese Diet and announce a snap election. With the opposition too weak to challenge the LDP, he could win. But that would not help him overcome the trust deficit entirely. To do that, he should take bolder steps, such as reshuffling his cabinet and appointing only people younger than 60, half of them women. He should also recruit from the private sector. Doing so would signal a clear break from the LDP’s gerontocracy, which voters associate with anaemic governance and lack of transparency.

The current trust crisis also presents an opportunity for Japan’s bureaucracy. A shortage of experienced public servants has forced government agencies to look elsewhere for mid-career talent. Japan’s public sector must implement its own reforms. A more open and transparent civil service would again attract talented and ambitious young professionals—and bolster trust in Japan’s leaders.

As Canberra moves into ever-closer alignment with Tokyo through their ‘special strategic partnership’, it’s timely to examine exactly what the security strategy of our key partner now looks like, and identify ways in which we can mutually support one another across a range of activities aimed at responding to regional challenges and upholding the rules-based international order.

The tragic death of former prime minister Shinzo Abe on 8 July has brought renewed focus to the prolific contribution he made to charting a new course for Japan during his term of office. As early as 2013, Abe proclaimed in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC that ‘Japan is back!’ During his long second tenure in office, which ended in 2020, he did his best to deliver on that promise and carve out a far more prominent role for Japan as a security actor under the banner of a ‘proactive contribution to international peace’. He presided over a quiet transformation of Japan’s security strategy, supercharging a process begun by his predecessors, and one which now continues to unfold under his successors.

Understanding Japan’s security strategy requires a look at how Tokyo perceives the regional security environment in the Indo-Pacific, and the challenges that policymakers in Japan face. In essence, the outlook is rather bleak. Japan hasn’t experienced such a potentially hostile landscape since the end of the Cold War. Today, the Indo-Pacific is marked by China’s assertiveness in the East and South China Seas, underlined by a considerable Chinese military build-up; North Korean nuclear and missile testing; and Russian air patrols circling the Japanese archipelago. These essential dangers are further multiplied by Sino-Russian cooperation (including military exercises), married with acute competition over the acquisition of emerging disruptive technologies (such as cyber, electromagnetic and hypersonic capabilities), which can be applied to ‘hybrid’ or ‘grey-zone’ conflicts as well as high-intensity military operations. Australia shares all of these concerns with differing degrees of convergence or intensity.

As I explain in a new ASPI report, launched today, to meet this veritable panoply of challenges to regional stability, Tokyo has progressively crafted a well-defined and well-articulated security strategy. It can be understood by focusing on several dimensions, which are working in tandem to reshape Japan’s security identity.

The first of these is a new and revitalised diplomatic role for Japan, chiefly taking its expression through the ‘vision’ of a free and open Indo-Pacific. This concept was first unveiled in 2016 and has since been adopted, with variations, by the US, India and Australia. It aims to shape the regional order by focusing on three interlocking pillars: the rule of law, economic prosperity, and peace and stability. What is particularly noteworthy about the concept is how it represents a major initiative to stake out a renewed leadership role for itself in the region. No longer content to simply follow and support the broader US-led liberal international order, Japan has emerged as an entrepreneur and architect of regional order in its own right, even if the vision is designed to be implemented with allies and partners, such as Australia, playing a strong part.

To better provide for its own security, Japan has reformed its domestic security apparatus and strengthened its defence architecture.

One of the abiding constraints on Japan’s security role has always been domestic legislation, often relating to the 1947 ‘peace constitution’ (which remains firmly in place). In light of practical realities, Tokyo has progressively put in place the necessary legal instruments—most prominently with the 2015 peace and security legislation—to play a more proactive role and facilitate meaningful cooperation with partners. This builds upon earlier efforts to centralise control of security affairs in the Office of the Prime Minister (Kantei) and National Security Secretariat, with a dedicated national security adviser.

The government has also sought to streamline its cumbersome bureaucracy through a more responsive and efficient defence architecture that breaks down administrative barriers between service branches to create a more unified command posture. This includes strengthening of the Joint Staff Office, as well as efforts to streamline its defence procurement processes. If the proposed defence budget increase from 1% to 2% of GDP occurs, Japan’s defence architecture will be transformed even further.

Another central element in this is Tokyo’s aspiration to restructure the Japan Self-Defense Forces into a ‘multi-domain defence force’ harnessing new capabilities in the cyber, space and electromagnetic domains to ensure it is fit to meet the challenges of 21st-century conflict. Especially notable in this process are the acquisition of strike capabilities—long-range missiles (cruise, hypersonic) that can hit enemy bases to forestall ballistic missile attacks on Japan—and the beefing up of local air superiority. Such capabilities are projected to be distributed across all of the service branches, and to contribute to national missile defence, in addition to an obvious deterrent function. Japan’s efforts towards an enhanced strike capability also provide valuable lessons for Australia as well as opening up the possibility of defence technological collaboration in this sphere (through the 2014 defence technology cooperation agreement).

But Japan realises that it cannot go it alone, however successful its diplomacy or however much it improves its military defences.

Tokyo therefore puts a premium on revitalising its pivotal defence alliance with the US, while at the same time consolidating a range of new ‘strategic partnerships’ with other like-minded countries.

Japan is committed to bolstering its alliance with the US to improve their combined crisis response through an allied coordination mechanism. That may assist in addressing the pressing need for a more interoperable alliance posture—one which extends to ground and air forces, building on the already well-established navy-to-navy relationship.

Beyond the alliance, Japan has entered into cooperative security relations with Australia, India, the UK, the EU and a range of Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines. The nature of cooperation varies, but the essential aim is to build a network of partners across the region that share Japan’s security concerns and are willing to contribute to a common front in resisting regional challenges, especially in the maritime domain. Further reinforcement of such bilateral partnerships also occurs minilaterally through key mechanisms such as the Japan–US–Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue and the Quad.

All of this matters to Australia, and, indeed, has been warmly welcomed among the strategic community. Since Australia shares deep concern about the deterioration in the regional security environment, policymakers have generally applauded Japan’s willingness to take on a stronger role, including the development of its defence capabilities, thus allowing it to make a greater contribution to regional stability and deterrence.

Tokyo’s championing of the free and open Indo-Pacific vision closely addresses many of the strategic concerns held in Canberra, and the two countries’ special strategic partnership provides the means for them to jointly address challenges to the rules-based order. Japan’s openness to cooperate with Australia as a privileged strategic partner is also seen in the recent reciprocal access agreement and the increased tempo of cooperation across a spectrum of areas, including economic and cybersecurity dialogues, information sharing, joint exercises and a united diplomatic front.

The transformation of the Japan–Australia relationship, especially since the dark days of World War II, is a remarkable achievement and testament to the leadership of Abe and a succession of Australian counterparts. Japan’s revitalised role as a security actor in the Indo-Pacific creates further scope for deepening bilateral and minilateral cooperation in the years ahead.