Asia Focus

Aboard the Kurama - Nearly 50 warships crowded the bay just south of Tokyo, all flying the Rising Sun flag. Sea-to-sea missiles roared off the decks of several destroyers, and submarines emerged like a pod of whales from the surf.

More than an exercise, this was a message: In Asia's accelerating arms race, Japan is determined not to fall behind.

“The security environment surrounding our nation has changed dramatically in recent years,'' Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the sailors aboard this destroyer after watching Japan's annual fleet review Sunday. “I believe this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate our readiness”.

Though in the planning for months, the fleet review - Japan's biggest show of its military might each year - came just weeks after North Korea sent shock waves through the region with the Oct. 9 announcement that it had conducted its first nuclear test.

The test brought particularly strong condemnation from Japan, which is within striking distance of North Korea's ballistic missiles. Japan plays host to about 50,000 U.S. soldiers, who would probably also be high on the list of potential targets should North Korea decide to launch an air attack.

But well before North Korea's nuclear announcement, Japan, the United States and Asia's other big power, China, have been scrambling to enhance their military standing in a region rife with territorial disputes, economic tensions and the remnants of Cold War rivalries.

“For Japan, the radical shift has already happened in many ways,'' said Lance Gatling, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who is now a private analyst.

Gatling cited North Korea's launch of a long-range ballistic missile over Japan's main island in August 1998 as the key event. Tokyo responded by launching its own intelligence-gathering satellites and agreeing to join in the creation of a U.S.- led ballistic missile shield - a move it had previously considered too provocative.

Japan, which Gatling said has just 7 to 12 minutes to respond to a North Korean missile attack, will soon be bristling with Patriot interceptors. A U.S. Army detachment is being deployed on the southern island of Okinawa, and reports this week said Japan is also considering putting more missiles around Tokyo, where roughly one-quarter of all Japanese live.

Abe and other senior members of Japan's ruling party, meanwhile, firmly support an overhaul of the country's post-World War II constitution, which bans the use of military force as a means of settling international disputes. Over the next several months, the nation's Defense Agency is expected to be revamped into a full-fledged ministry.

But officials also say the need for a stronger military is not a knee-jerk reaction to North Korea, and instead reflects deeper problems specific to the region.

“With the creation of the European Union, it is now hard to imagine a nation-on-nation war in Europe,'' Japan's new defense chief, Fumio Kyuma, said last week.

“But in East Asia, we still have this possibility”.

Kyuma also noted that with the addition of North Korea, Asia is now the best-represented region in the world's nine-country nuclear club - with India, Pakistan and China having already demonstrated their capabilities.

Still, Kyuma has come out strongly against the nuclear option, as has Abe.

“I am from Nagasaki”, Kyuma said earlier this month. “I hope Nagasaki will be the last place on Earth ever to suffer a nuclear attack”.

Written: by Eric Talmadge

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Publish: by LuisB