Tokyo Expected to Hike Defense Budget Following Liberal Democrats’ Resounding Election Win

In April, the Liberal Democrat-led Japanese government announced its intent to double the country’s defense budget to 2% of its gross domestic product. Tokyo was already the world’s ninth-largest spender on its military, despite Japan being a constitutionally pacifist country.

According to the Japanese daily Nikkei, the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will scrap its usual ceiling on defense-related spending requests for the coming fiscal year, paving the way for a dramatic increase in military spending. Kishida is set to approve the policy before the end of the month.

Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, told the South China Morning Post that the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier this month had allowed his Liberal Democratic Party to pursue its longstanding goal of amending Article 9, the so-called pacifism clause, of Japan’s constitution.

“It is clear that Kishida was already planning to boost defense spending, but the assassination of Abe has served to put wind in his sails and even the normally extremely cautious Ministry of Finance is not now raising any objections,” Kingston told the Hong Kong paper.

Abe’s killing, just days before parliamentary elections, catapulted the Liberal Democrats, a right-wing party, to a resounding victory and an even greater majority in the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Japanese Diet.

He said that between recent missile tests by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), increased tensions with China over Taiwan, and Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, Kishida’s government was “almost spoiled for choice” when it came to justifications for hiking the defense budget.

“[W]hat is interesting is that if Abe had put forward these plans when he was prime minister, there would have been a quick and harsh pushback,” Kingston told the SCMP. During his nine years in power, Abe pushed to remove or amend the pacifism clause of the Japanese constitution that was put in place after World War II as a guard against renewed Japanese militarism.

“Everything that has happened in Ukraine has really put the liberal left on the back foot and altered that commitment to peace that has long been a part of the national psyche,” he added. “I had expected a more vigorous response, but it has been relatively muted.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Japan had the world’s ninth-largest military budget last year, spending $54.1 billion, or 1.1% of its GDP, despite its pacifist constitution. That was a 7.3% increase over its budget the previous year, the largest increase of any of the top 15 military spenders except for Iran.

Nonetheless, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said in April that Kishida’s government has plans to double that to 2% of GDP within five years. At a projected $108 billion per year, that would make Japan's military budget the world’s third-largest, after the United States and China. Kishi said Japan was particularly interested in “counterstrike capabilities” that could hit the bases of countries that attack the island nation.

However, the move isn’t particularly popular with the Japanese public. A June poll by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency found that while 37.2% of Japanese citizens surveyed supported the proposed increase, almost as many, 31.5%, opposed it.