The Fight to Build Japan’s Military Is Just Beginning
The famously pacifist nation’s plans to double defense spending are both welcome and overdue. Now it needs to find a way to pay for them.
Tense times.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/BloombergMonks at Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple this week announced the Japanese public’s choice for the kanji character that best represents the year 2022. In a narrow vote, the winning character was 戦, pronounced sen or ikusa and meaning battle — or war.
It’s an appropriate choice not just because of the conflict in Ukraine, the threat of a missile barrage from North Korea and the other stories that have defined the year: it comes just as the country is starting to take seriously the idea of fighting for itself. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has ordered a doubling of the defense budget to 2% of the country’s GDP in the next five years, an outlay of some 43 trillion yen ($312 billion) that would lift the ostensibly pacifist nation into the ranks of the world’s biggest defense spenders.