Japan is back… again. This time as a Great Power?
Constrained by a pacifist constitution and a history of militarism, successive post-war Japanese governments have consistently denied any great power ambition. Japan’s leaders instead cultivated a pacifist middle power identity by carefully avoiding entanglement in disputes with or between other states, focusing on trade and investment, and strongly supporting international institutions and diplomatic negotiation while strictly limiting defence spending and engagement.
But despite its well established middle power credentials, and relative economic decline over the last twenty five years, Japan has long possessed great power potential and meets many of the (often problematic) great power status criteria: it has the world’s fourth largest economy (nominal GDP) and seventh most powerful military, in addition to high levels of diplomatic, financial, and soft power influence both regionally and globally. The two great power attributes Japan has lacked at least since the end of the Pacific War are the willingness to behave as a great power and offensive military capabilities. Japan’s middle power identity, however, may be coming to an end due to the more volatile international environment Japan now faces and the increased domestic appetite for major foreign and national defence policy reforms it is encouraging among policymakers and the public.
Over the last 15 years, the rationale for and enablers of Japan’s middle power status have gradually eroded, making a fundamental shift in Japanese strategic thinking not only possible but for some unavoidable. Increasing great power competition; major shifts in US policy priorities and alliance commitment; the declining authority and influence of international institutions; and, in particular, an increasingly powerful and revisionist China are together creating a compelling case for Japan’s foreign policy and defence posture moving beyond its long-standing domestic constraints.
Governments reinterpreting Japan’s constitutional defence and military limits is far from new. The current environment’s volatility and uncertainty, however, is generating an unprecedented level of domestic support for constitutional change rather than only reinterpretation. Indeed, the stars are aligning for the Takaichi government to further expand former prime minister Abe’s earlier defence and security reforms and his largely successful efforts to make Japanese foreign policy more proactive.
Japan’s incremental shift away from the Yoshida doctrine strategy of hedging its economic and trade priorities against its security and political interests and avoiding conflict and other diplomatic entanglements began with international criticism of Japan’s “cheque book diplomacy” after the first Gulf War and growing US pressure for Japan to contribute more as both an alliance partner and supporter of the US-led liberal order. That shift gathered momentum with the cycle of national interest clashes that began with China in the early 2000s and later with Washington’s ongoing pressure for greater burden sharing among its allies.
By 2012, China already had overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy and was directly threatening Japanese territory in the East China Sea and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Coupled with Tokyo’s ever-present fear of US abandonment, further augmented at this stage by Washington’s Middle East preoccupation over the previous decade, the Abe government began a series of important reforms based on further reinterpretations of Japan’s constitution, the most significant of which was the 2015 passing of legislation allowing limited Japanese collective self-defence participation.
Over the following decade, Abe accelerated Japan’s external balancing efforts and introduced several landmark internal balancing measures by significantly bolstering all three Self Defence Force (SDF) capabilities. The Trump administration’s adoption of Abe’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific doctrine and his leadership of the Quad’s revival in 2017, together with Japan’s deepening military cooperation with other East Asia/Pacific US allies – Australia, the Philippines, and more recently South Korea – demonstrated not only that “Japan back”, but that a very different Japan had returned. Abe’s thinking also involved fundamentally altering Japan’s post-war security posture under his “counterstrike capabilities” plan for the SDF to acquire domestically and US-produced long-range missiles, which was later operationalised under the Kishida government’s 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS).
Under the current prime minister and Abe acolyte Sanae Takaichi, Abe’s vision for Japan’s “normalisation” of its defence and deterrence capabilities is rapidly expanding. Buoyed by high cabinet approval ratings thanks to the recent right-wing populist shift among Japanese voters and mounting regional security concerns, Takaichi has taken a much more antagonistic approach to relations with China and pledged to advance Japan’s “comprehensive national power” buildup. The realisation of her government’s ambitious list of defence and security changes and acquisitions would confirm Japan’s rise as a regional great power, or at the very least make its traditional middle power status far more difficult to argue.
Takaichi’s comprehensive national power agenda, which already has removed restrictions on Japan’s lethal weapons exports and encouraged her Minister of Defense to argue the previously taboo issue of Japan becoming a nuclear weapon state and acquiring nuclear powered submarines, certainly indicates her government’s strong ambitions for a very different Japanese defence and security posture. But the realisation of those ambitions largely depends on her government’s ability to sustain her accelerated 2026 target of increasing the national defence budget to 2 per cent of GDP (A$85.9 billion) and beyond in future years. Doing so may prove very difficult given Japan’s debt-ridden fiscal situation, weakening currency, shrinking domestic tax base, and very strong voter opposition to increased taxes.
Another, and perhaps more difficult, challenge is overcoming the structural constraints on expanding Japan’s military power. Japan’s rapid and ongoing population decline means SDF recruitment will likely struggle even more in the future than it does already, while changing the Constitution’s Article 9 limits on Japan’s military capability, another of Takaichi’s fast-track pledges, will be far from easy even in Japan’s current political environment.
How far Japan goes towards shedding its self-imposed security restraints and normalising its military capabilities remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is the debt Japan’s Abe-aligned policy hawks now owe Xi Jinping and Donald Trump for helping align the political stars so nicely.
Professor Michael Heazle is an Adjunct member of the Griffith Asia Institute.