Japan has announced its biggest ever defence budget in response to China’s increasing military influence in the region and Beijing’s claims to a group of disputed islands administered by Tokyo.
The 4.98 trillion yen (US$ 42bn) budget approved by the cabinet on Wednesday is up 2% from last year and marks the third straight increase after more than a decade of cuts.
The rise is in line with Japan’s
more assertive defence policy under the conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, as he seeks to counter Chinese influence and
remove the postwar legal shackles from his country’s military.
This year Abe is expected to push for legislation to reinterpret Japan’s constitution to allow Japanese troops to fight alongside allies on foreign soil for the first time since the end of the second world war. The move has been welcomed in Washington, which wants Japan to play a bigger role in the bilateral security alliance.
At US$112.2bn, China’s defence budget dwarfs that of Japan. China is second only to the US, which spent US$600.4bn on defence in 2013, while Japan ranked seventh,
according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
Much of the military hardware included in Japan’s new budget is designed to monitor outlying territories and repel any attempt to invade island chains in the East China Sea.
It includes money for 20 P-1 maritime surveillance aircraft, six F-35 fighters, five Osprey planes that double as helicopters, Global Hawk drones, two Aegis radar-equipped destroyers and a missile defence system to be jointly developed with the US.
The defence ministry also plans to buy 30 amphibious assault vehicles and an early-warning aircraft that will patrol islands in southern Japan.
The defence minister, Gen Nakatani, said extra defence spending was a response to the “changing situation” in the region – a clear reference to repeated incursions by Chinese surveillance ships in waters near the Senkakus.