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Why Japan Is Facing Pressure To Return To Military Research (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's growing nation status has Japan reconsidering its 70-year old ban on military research projects, as Japanese defense circles actively seek to take advantage of the country's vanguard position in robotic technology. Pressure from the government is also mounting, as authorities try to find means to bring university researchers into the defense fold — particularly to meet the challenge of a more aggressive Chinese military. Funding cuts in Japanese higher education, combined with a weakened economy and governmental austerity measures, may make the allure of military funding irresistible to researchers and academic institutions.
I really hope Japan resists becoming more militarised and aggressive. The current pacifist constitution is a model other countries should look too, not one that should be abandoned. Abe wants Japan to become a "normal" country, but look at what "normal" gets us. The weaponry we export in no way makes up for what we waste on wars, and much of it goes to dubious places and killing the families of people who them try to kill us.
More than that, being pacifist has kept Japan safe for decades. The threat is always there, they have rockets and could build nuclear weapons in months, but the fact that they don't have any of it prevents escalation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
An extremely innovative industrial powerhouse turns to military R&D, what could possibly go wrong.
Or more likely it has to do with China becoming much bolder in it's attempts to take control of the South China Sea and the Spratly Islands. And then there is NK which has launched multiple missiles over them in blatant threat to them.
Not everything relating to global military concerns revolves around the US.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
The US doesn't start fights. It imposes itself into fights it has no reason being involved in. Totally different.
Regarding Japan though, I doubt the Japanese are fearful of the US attacking them anytime soon. It's more that they're worried, rightfully, that if China were to invade them the US may or may not help defend them depending on the politics of the situation. Also the Chinese have been seizing any rock poking it's head above water in the South China Sea to claim territorial rights on, and there's quite a few disputed rocks that China & Japan both claim ownership of.
Don't forget NK and their not subtle threats. But you nailed it.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
It is unfortunate that Japan has to consider rearming itself, but with North Korea's ability to launch (possibly nuclear) missiles at Japan, and China's increasingly belligerent tone in the south china sea, Japans current pacifist constitution cannot stand. It cannot rely on the US to wholly protect her. If we could all take a step back and realize the silliness of it all, the world would be a much nicer place, but we are all jerks to someone else, whether you want to be or not and you do need to protect yourself, lest you get shot bringing words to a gun fight.
Thanks for the new word, I had not come across "revanchist" before. For anyone else who has to look up a definition:
Revanchism (from French: revanche, "revenge") is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement - wikipedia.
Oh no... it's the future.
The US doesn't start fights. It imposes itself into fights it has no reason being involved in. Totally different.
What? We actually create enemies and then attack them. The precise opposite of your assertion is true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh dear god, please build Mechs! You'll need them when giant creatures emerge from a rift in space-time in the Pacific...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The only reason that Japan is doing this is because China is coming. The USA currently guarantees Japan's safety, but seeing as the Japanese hate the US military being on their soil, it's only a matter of time until they get kicked out, to thunderous applause. Then, it's back to the good old days of Japan/China relations.
Why are the Chinese doing what they're doing? Two reasons, the first being that they require external resources to power their economy. Without military control, they're under the domination of the international bankers, and we all know how well that turns out.
China's view is, "we were out of commission for 150 years, but now we're back, and it's time return to the old system where everyone acknowledges China as the center of the world (a far better translation of 'zhongguo' than the pathetic 'middle kingdom' literal translation). Oh, and we're bringing back the kowtow so be ready to knock your head on the floor when you visit us." They were wronged in the past, and now it is time for others to be wronged. Social justice in action. The second reason is to distract their population from the horrid job the Communist Party is doing. Growth is slowing, people are getting restless, and some of them are getting crazy ideas like they could do a better job running the government themselves rather than allowing the smart people to do it. The smart people have been ruthlessly fucking over the ordinary people and laughing about it. You can turn on Chinese TV any hour of the day or night and see at least 2-3 wartime dramas, all reminding the people about WWII. Sheesh, we Americans got sucker-punched by the Japanese but we paid them back in spades. China never got to do this...the Japanese surrendered and suffered few defeats in the mainland. So they do it on TV every day...the joke is that more Japanese soldiers die every month at TV studios than died during the whole war. And it is always the Communist Party doing the fighting, when the truth is that they wisely stayed out of the war and let the right-wingers do all the dying. You gotta hand it to them, they have a good plan and they're executing it well. Japan doesn't really have a choice but to re-arm, they want the Americans out and without defense, it will be Japan who will become a client of China.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The American president is going to launch a nuclear war because China invades Japan? Not a chance.
Japan is also getting into the business of arms exports, as well. For instance, they're one of the finalists (and the favored contender) to win a contract to build submarines for the Australian Navy (other competitors being France and Germany).
Overall, this is nothing bad - even were Japan to fully rearm, Japan today is a far cry from the aggressive expansionist of 80 years ago. China is the real threat to international stability and order in East Asia with its aggressive attempts to seize outlying islands on the flimsiest of justifications. (North Korea is a threat as well, but more to South Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan)
The Japanese public is also incredibly wary of full rearmament, and they're undergoing massive protests to the current government's plan to even relax some of the pacifist restrictions to let them do things like help the USA prior to a direct attack. To put another way, as it currently stands, if North Korea attacks South Korea, and starts firing missiles at US ships, Japan wouldn't be able to do a thing until Japan itself is fired on - not even to shoot down missiles targeting US transports.
Japan has had a long history with China, and generally not a good one. Based on that I'd saw the need increased military research needs to and will happen. China has been throwing it's weight around in a number of areas including the South China Sea dispute as well as Taiwan. One should say Japan was in a hard place for most of it's existence. A small group of islands with big neighbours just next door. Kinda of like the UK. They will certainly need something to make people think twice about invading them. The USA for the moments has interests in keeping Japan (and Taiwan) protected from China. But that could change. If it does, what will hold China back if it decides to "liberate" Japan? (They used a similar excuse for Tibet)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Bullshit. If China invades Japan, ICBMs be flying within the hour.
It's not about invading, it's about bullying. If China gets control over the seas around Japan it can always threaten to blockade the Japanese archipelago, holding it in a stranglehold, and then engage in a staring contest over who wants to launch nukes (think Cuban missile crisis). It is necessary to Japan's survival to have unimpeded access to the oceans for trade, and since WW2 it has relied on the United States to guarantee it (the United States is grossly under appreciated in how it's domination of the blue oceans has facilitated global trade and the creation of global GDP). Japan would be extremely uncomfortable if it had to rely on China to guarantee it's ability to trade around the world.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the research is really only concentrated in two areas:
1) Missile defense technologies to counter NK
2) Navel defense technologies to counter China
Though realistically the second I don't really see as a "counter" so much as it is to apply pressure and to posture over territorial claims.
Japan is populated by humans, and is thus still subject to the same racist and nationalistic tendencies that they succumbed to before WWII (and which are resurgent in certain segments of the US population now).
Personally, I see nothing wrong with Japan toning down its pacifism a bit (and becoming a little less reliant on US protection), but I can also see how some of the folks over there would be reasonably concerned about things getting out of hand.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I like to think that there are many alternatives short of nukes that would render China so damaged that it would have to withdraw; cruise missiles onto all major power stations, water treatment works and oil storage and refineries would render the country chaotic very fast. But you may well be right about the need to demonstrate the viability of deterrence.
Heh, at least two good comments in one thread. You are correct by my reckoning. The US hasn't a damned thing to fear from China. Japan? Well, maybe if the US doesn't protect them and they're left to their own devices, then they're royally screwed. I imagine that China has some history books and a few people left alive that remember. If China gets their hands on Japan, they might just wipe them off the face of the Earth. Add to that, Japan still has people worshiping their war criminals so it's not like any apology from official channels has meant anything.
It'd be mildly annoying for the folks in the US. But, it might bring some manufacturing jobs back to the country. I can only imagine that the US will be asked to help clean it up, blamed for it, and then second-guessed for years after the end of the conflict. Then, quite likely, they'll all forget that the US paid to rebuild their country and go right back to the same behavior except this time they'll be bitching even more because we stopped letting them bomb themselves into rubble every generation or two. It seems likely.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
One doesn't have to be a 'Putin Bot' to recognize that the Turkey of today is no longer the Turkey of Kemal Mustafa a.k.a. Ataturk.
Kemal Ataturk saw Islam as an ideology that kept Turkey from becoming a modern state, and so after removing the Caliphate, he made Turkey a secular country - even though its population was fully Muslim - and totally redid its culture in far reaching ways - like replacing the Arabic script w/ the Roman. His successors did everything they could to integrate Turkey into Europe. Unfortunately, the Turks were and are Muslims, not Europeans, and culturally, they are closer to their comrades in Turkestan - the stans of Central Asia. So making them 'European' required putting them under military rule for long periods of time, and that was something that the EU frowned upon, since every EU member was supposed to be fully democratic.
So cue to Erdogan, who won an election once the Army decided to appease the Europeans and stand down. Well, Erdogan was never someone who was much interested in Turkey being integrated into Europe: rather, he was more interested in reviving Turkey's former greatness, which meant pre-Kemal greatness. Like the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey, as the Caliphate, was the leader of the Muslim world. In the current Middle East, Turkey sees a resurgent Iran asserting claims of leadership of the Muslim world, but knows that the Sunni world would never accept as its leader a Shia power. But Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors like Qatar are too underpopulated & weak to assert any leadership, so it's a vacuum Turkey is happy to fill. Which also explains why Turkey has been opposed to expanding the definition of all radical Muslim groups as the enemy of NATO, when they were discussing the scope of the alliance. And as is well known, it's Turkey, rather than Iraq or Jordan or Lebanon, that has been the point of entry for ISIS volunteers into Syria. You know, the average Westerner who converts to Islam, takes a flight to Istanbul, goes over to Gaziantep and then crosses the border into Raqqa.
That does not compare w/ the overt support of Russia and Iran for the regime in Syria. It's always been the policy of Western powers to support dictatorships in the Middle East like that of Mubarak in Egypt, and given the events of the Arab Spring, even the toppling of formerly anti-Western dictatorships like Gadaffi has had its deleterious effects. Russia's decision to prop up Assad, while mainly from self interest - it doesn't want to lose its last customer of military hardware in the region - is not the same as them supporting Russian separatists in the Donbass. Indeed, there are enough US leaders - Trump, Cruz, Paul - who recognize that the US doesn't have an ally among the Sunni Arabs, and should not get too involved w/ any of the factions seeking to overthrow Assad.
Japan still has people worshiping their war criminals
Mod up... and on a related note, this is one of many reasons why we don't want the country of my childhood performing "military research." There's always been something about the insular nature of Japanese culture and the homogeneous nature of Japanese society that lends itself to following the crowd and not questioning authority; it can be argued that there's no country on the planet more likely to succumb to sick-fuck shit than Nihon...