Japan’s Self-Defence Forces Are Beginning to Focus on China
economist.com
economist.com
Clearly, they worry about China, but they really worry about how the Japanese military answered to no one in the last decade of Imperial Japan.
This is what concerns a lot of Japanese people. The military wrote a check that the Japanese people had to cash.
But I also know quite a few Japanese people in their early thirties, some of them very very very to the right of the political spectrum. Even to them Imperial Japan is sheer terror. Young kids being forced to commit suicide (kamikaze), endless suffering of the population, a crazy mentality, worshiping the emperor as a god, horrific experiments in the Chinese countryside, etc. My sample might be small, but I don't think there's much nostalgia of Imperial Japan anywhere in the Japanese population.
[1] Extra points if you can't even recognize Abe doing giving an interview on TV. And yes, that one has never missed an election. That's the most terrifying part to me. If you want to opt out of caring about politics, it's completely fine by me, but at least do it completely...
You have this idea that the Japanese military will become a runaway juggernaut subjugating Japan under its will, and this is simply ridiculous. No signs point to it.
I could almost accuse you of fear mongering
Also, your accusation that most Japanese are "very uneducated when it comes to politics/history" is anecdotal and incomplete at best, comically reductive at worst. Do you even read Japanese? Do you not see the amount of considered, deep analysis and discussion on TV and in the newspapers? Do you not see the huge numbers of books on history in the bookshops?
In any case, it is ridiculous to claim that "most" (or even some) Japanese people live in fear of the SDF. You'd be laughed out of the room for claiming that in front of anyone with even a passing knowledge of Japan.
Massive populations and political revolution are the common cause. Japan doesn't have the conditions for either, even if Abe achieved his relatively anodyne constitutional amendments. China is more susceptible to adopting that expansionary role, and it doesn't have a constitution binding its hands.
Japan uses Chinese characters not because they were ever invaded by a Chinese army. Soft power isn't a modern American invention. The Chinese mastered it a thousand years ago!
That's a narrative story, not a history.
"China" has never been a continuously consolidated political entity. The PRC (and the ROC, and previous imperial governments) find it a useful myth to equate its current geography of control with a tradition that hearkens back through millenia, but it's quite simply not. The Qin dynasty initially controlled the area of a small province, and conquered its neighboring state rivals one by one to establish a dominion over them; it fell, just as countless other empires fell, leading to centuries of alternating fragmentation and consolidation.
Even in modern times, various political entities that position themselves in the history of China have engaged in expansionist colonial missions over a range of territories, from Xinjiang to Taiwan to Tibet. Even Inner Manchuria is only considered "part of China" because the Qing dynasty ruled it and China simultaneously. (As an interesting aside, contemporaneous Han historiography considered the Qing ruling class foreign usurpers; it was only in the 20th century that ROC/PRC historiography decided to incorporate the Qing Dynasty into China's lineage, for political reasons.)
No one in Japan is afraid of the Japanese military.
Utter fiction
In the short-to-mid term its good for US, a formidable ally with world class navy! But a Japan with powerful navy cant help itself but wants to dominate Pacific, that what happened in December of 1941, the rest is history.
Japan has little to gain from going on another rampage through Asia conquering stuff. Even if you ignore that annexing other countries tends to make you an international pariah these days (see Russia in eastern Ukraine), everyone near them either has nukes (Russia, the PRC, and the DPRK) or is in some form of alliance with the US (the ROK and ROC).
This is not to defend Japan's actions, they did totally unjustified things in China, and as it turned out after Japan modernized, the west never posed a threat (as WWII would wipe out the Europeans ability to colonize and the US had no interest in it.
The point being, now our perspective on history is very different. Colonization is a thing of the past. Respecting borders is by and large an unimpeachable norm across most of the world. I don't think Japan will feel the same pressures.
I fear that Crimea and the Golan Heights will turn out to be the first drops in a devastating torrent.
As far as Crimea goes the world is much better off with it than the alternative of forcing Russia’s hand.
No one that can read a map ever thought Russia would give up their only warm water port, it’s also the reason why they went to Syria it’s their only port with access to the med that doesn’t have a NATO toll booth controlling it.
Russia is a land locked country with all of its strategic assets and everything it cares about within strike distance of NATO FOBs.
The US and NATO isn’t stupid they won’t be bogged down fighting over the rubbles of Stalingrad and they are much better logistically equipped to fight in winter than Napoleon.
If a conventional conflict breaks out NATO tanks would find themselves on the outskirts of Moscow well before Russia can reach Warsaw yet alone Berlin.
The buffer zone of the former Baltic and Soviet states has eroded and as much as the Baltics fear Russia if I was a Russian general I would be binge drinking and for a good reason just to stop my balls from shivering.
Russia has no strategic depth, it’s land locked and thanks to improvements in air and missile defense also air and even space locked.
Their geographical actions are about as predictable as playing risk with a 3 year old but just like that game the biggest risk is you have no idea if and when they’ll throw a tantrum and smash the board.
Your comment seems to be suggesting WW2 was the trigger, but it had been underway for decades, WW2 merely sped it up.
We have many dark periods in our history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Annexation_of_Crimea_...
The slow move towards a more unified world under the UN is decaying into nationalism, I argue as a result of lowered prosperity in response to a combination of less third world regions to exploit and less population growth to extract profits from.
Even an "attack" (something short of an invasion), consisting of surgical strikes (and what, nukes?) would be prohibitively costly in every way possible and would also be 100% guaranteed to bring the US in to the conflict.
The Chinese government likes having Japan around as a useful lightning conductor for public anger, which redirects protests away from them. They are Japan's biggest trading partner. They are not going to invade any country this useful and valuable to them.
Please don't use a word like "invade" lightly; it's very, very far from ever being a reality.
I do recommend subscribing -- their articles are really good. I find the give a great global business perspective. The downside is it can get a bit dry sometimes and it can be challenging to read it all each week