Naming Hypothetical Enemy

Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is mostly out of Japan this week. He keeps on meeting foreign leaders, making speech and visiting places for selling his agenda to the world. So, what did he want to sell? It seemed to be macho Japan. Stressing the reason of his intention to reinterpreting the Constitution to enable exercising collective self-defense right, he appealed the necessity to deal with growing big neighbor. In other words, he figuratively named China as hypothetical enemy.

In a policy speech at Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in New York, Abe emphasized that Japan was going to proactively contribute to international peace. To implement that, he explained that Japan needed to exercise collective self-defense right for supporting its activity when enemy would attack friend forces.

Meanwhile, he highlighted the existence of China. “There is a country next to Japan with military spending twice as large as Japan’s and occupies the second position following the United States,” said Abe. It meant that Japan was enhancing its capability for dealing with pressure from particular neighbor country. Reminding China and South Korea was calling him a right wing hawk, Abe insisted “If you want to call me right wing militarist, do it.”

Although it is said to be aiming at helping U.S. ships attacked on the open sea and friend troops in U.N. peacekeeping operation, the reinterpretation of the Constitution is basically considered to unleash Japan’s Self-defense Force from the limitation of its use only for self-defense. In the conference with the Cabinet press corps in New York, Abe told that collective self-defense right was not a geographical concept. It meant that Self-defense Force would go anywhere in the world without geographical limitation, after the Constitution would be reinterpreted.

Abe is eager to make military ties with as much nations as he can. In the meeting with Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, he agreed with Harper to establish the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement as Japan had with U.S. In the Foreign Ministers meeting of Japan and France, both agreed on accelerating the joint development on military procurement. It also was a demonstration of Japan to be a military macho against potential threat around it.

However, it is highly skeptical that Japan will actually be able to deal with China’s threat. No hawkish figure in Japan expects to be actually involved in military action against China, only asserting higher security would deter actual collision and intensively ignoring the negative aspect of military escalation.