Return of the Samurai

Riceman was on high alert. So was Vader (as in Darth), a Japanese fighter pilot whose sinister call sign belies his smiling countenance. At Naha Air Base, perched on the subtropical tail of the Japanese archipelago, F-15 pilots from the 204th tactical fighter squadron know what the sudden, hushed message broadcast over the loudspeakers one rainy afternoon in September means: another emergency fighter-jet mission for a nation that technically doesn’t even possess a conventional military. Territorial tensions between Japan and China have intensified over a scattering of islands in the East China Sea, which Japan administers but to which China lays historic claim. As a result, the squall-prone skies over Naha have darkened with the shadow of scrambled jets overhead. “The stress level has increased,” says Atsushi “Riceman” Takahashi, a veteran fighter pilot who now instructs younger charges. “The scramblings show our pride in securing our domain.”

From April to June, 69 Japanese jets were deployed because of perceived threats from China, compared with just 15 during the same period last year. September was just as busy, with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) responding to: the first confirmed flight of a Chinese drone over Japan; the first reported flight of Chinese bombers on a course not far from Naha; and a flotilla of Chinese coast-guard vessels sailing through waters near the disputed islands — called Senkaku by the Japanese and Diaoyu by the Chinese. “Going up [in an F-15] makes me feel like I’m really playing a part in national defense,” says Kohta “Vader” Araki. “The responsibility is very heavy.”

Naha Air Base borders Okinawa prefecture’s main civilian airport, thronged with sunburned holiday seekers in flowered shirts. Commercial planes with colorful logos touch down just as gray camouflage F-15s roar into the sky. It is an incongruous scene in a nation that is divided over its martial past and future. After World War II, Japan’s DNA was shaped into a pacifist helix, reinforced by a constitution that renounces war altogether. The charter was imposed by the victorious Americans, who wanted to ensure that Japan would not repeat its imperialist rampage across Asia. In exchange, the U.S. charged itself with maintaining Japan’s national security. Japan was free to achieve its postwar economic miracle.

Now, under hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan is expanding its military footprint and speaking out more forcefully against nations it sees as threatening its sovereignty, most notably China. For Abe and other conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s samurai spirit is just as integral to the national makeup as any paeans to peace. A rewrite of the constitution, which has been interpreted as forbidding anything but defensive military maneuvers, is difficult — any change requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature, then a public referendum.

But this past summer, Abe said pursuing such an amendment was his “historic mission.” Pacifism is still the reflexive stance in Japan — just look at all those kids automatically flashing peace signs in photos. At the same time, a real debate is emerging about whether Japan can finally evolve into a normal country with a normal armed forces. “The constitution says Japan doesn’t possess an army, navy or air force,” Shigeru Ishiba, secretary general of the LDP, tells TIME. “Is that true? Japan does have an army, a navy, an air force. We have lots of warplanes and tanks. Let’s stop telling a lie. The constitution and the reality of Japan are different. I think it is now necessary to make our constitution reflect the reality of Japan.”

New Cop on the Beat
Japan’s sterner posture — no more deferential bows — comes at a time of shifting geopolitics in Asia. China has already claimed economic superiority over Japan, replacing it as the world’s second largest economy three years ago. Now, with confident leadership in place, Beijing is flexing its muscle over everything from trade to territory. Meanwhile, the U.S., the historically pre-eminent — if geographically remote — regional policeman has promised to refocus its attentions on Asia by deploying 60% of its naval vessels there by 2020, up from 50%. But this “rebalancing” — as the Obama Administration is now calling what was originally sold as a “pivot” to Asia — depends on Washington’s attentions not being dominated by the Middle East, as well as an American willingness to endure further overseas adventures. “When we think 10 years, 20 years or 30 years from now, the power of the U.S. will decline,” says the LDP’s Ishiba, noting the cuts in American military spending.

Enter Japan. Buoyed by a rare electoral mandate in two consecutive elections, Abe and his LDP envision a world in which Japan can not only stand firm against rivals like China but also share with an ascendant continent its national values: Democracy! Peace! Love for cute stuff!

Yet unlike the U.S., which has enjoyed relative goodwill in the region, Japan’s relations with some of its neighbors are still poisoned by the decidedly unpeaceful, undemocratic way in which it tried to fashion a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere more than seven decades ago. Animosity lingers because, unlike Germans, Japanese politicians can be equivocal about the nation’s wartime guilt. Also, leaders in China and South Korea, countries especially brutalized by Japan, profit politically from stoking anti-Japanese public sentiment. “The phantom of militarism is rising once more in Japan,” warned an August editorial in the People’s Daily, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. Even the U.S. — which is treaty-bound to defend Japan in case of attack, maintains military bases in the country and presumably isn’t averse to someone else needling China for a change — seems wary. “U.S. policymakers have sent clear signals to Abe that a further drift to the nationalist side is not welcome,” says Koichi Nakano, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Still, Abe’s combative stance has won him some surprising allies. He has strengthened economic ties with nations like India and Burma that are keen to hedge against China Inc. Southeast Asian nations are looking to Japan to counter China’s growing military might, even if they once suffered under the boot of the imperial Japanese army. A Pew survey released this summer found that about 80% of Filipinos, Indonesians and Malaysians regard Japan positively.

In July, Abe received a warm welcome in the Philippines, where Japanese soldiers had presided over the murderous 1942 Bataan death march. Manila is embroiled in its own territorial conflict with Beijing over disputed isles and shoals in the South China Sea, a vast waterway that China claims as nearly all its own. Abe came to town with promises of 10 cutters to upgrade the Philippine coast guard. In September, Japanese warships docked in Philippine ports, followed by U.S. armed forces who conducted joint war games with their Philippine counterparts. (In the early 1990s, U.S. military bases in the Philippines were closed because of local opposition, but the current government has indicated interest in a renewed American military presence.) “Japan has every right to enhance its military capability due to China’s provocation,” says Clarita Carlos, a former president of the National Defense College of the Philippines. “The Chinese are always playing the we-were-colonized-by-the-Japanese card. All of us have been there. We do remember, but we also know how to forgive.”

Security Fixation
Besides forgiveness, Japan needs revival. The country has been wounded by more than two decades of economic stagnation, and was hit hard by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis that claimed nearly 20,000 lives. Abe, who during his first stint as Prime Minister in 2006 became the nation’s youngest postwar leader, has projected himself as a bold changemaker. Since taking office again in December, he has launched a reform program, dubbed Abenomics, that aims to use monetary expansion and fiscal stimulus to goose Japan’s long-deflated economy. In September, the national mood was buoyed when Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics, despite international concerns over radioactive water leaking from a tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant. “I want to make the Olympics a trigger,” Abe said, “for sweeping away 15 years of deflation and economic decline.” In a February speech in Washington, he proclaimed: “Japan is back.”

Indeed, the LDP’s slogan is “Restore Japan,” and Abe has explicitly linked any economic recovery to Japan’s ability to protect its sovereignty. “Japan’s beautiful seas and its territory are under threat, and young people are having trouble finding hope in the future amid an economic slump,” he said in September 2012, as the Senkaku-Diaoyu row with China heated up. “I promise to protect Japan’s land and sea, and the lives of the Japanese people, no matter what.” This year, Japan’s defense budget increased for the first time in 11 years — by a paltry 0.8%, yes, but a clear signal from the Abe administration of the importance it places on national security. In August, the Defense Ministry requested a 3% rise in next year’s spending, which would be the biggest jump in more than two decades.

Despite the SDF’s constitutional limitations on any offensive use of force, Japan already boasts the world’s fifth largest defense coffers. This summer, the Defense Ministry unveiled the Izumo, Japan’s biggest warship of the postwar era, which resembles an aircraft carrier; plans are afoot to form a new amphibious corps of soldiers and a fleet of surveillance drones. Abe is also pushing for the formation of a Japanese National Security Council. On Sept. 17, he made a plea for the rhetorically tortured concept of “active pacifism,” or collective self-defense, in which Japan can come to the aid of its military allies should they come under attack. The liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun editorialized: “[Collective self-defense] would represent a radical departure from the basic security policy principle of postwar Japan and a gross deviation from its pacifist creed.”

The LDP has pitched Abe’s security fixation as self-preservation. “We would be happy if everyone in the world is good, and therefore we have no military force,” says LDP secretary general Ishiba. “However, our world doesn’t work that way.” Certainly, Japan lives in a nervous neighborhood that includes a nuclear North Korea and a China that is rapidly expanding its own military while fueling anti-Japanese fervor. In January, a Chinese frigate locked weapons-targeting radar on a Japanese destroyer in the Senkaku-Diaoyu area, often a precursor to a strike. (The Chinese vessel eventually stood down.) “The Northeast Asia security environment has dramatically changed,” says Satoshi Morimoto, a former Japanese Defense Minister. “I don’t think Abe is a rightist. He is a reasonable political leader trying to protect our territory.”

Japan’s official position on the disputed isles — which are located in waters rich in oil and natural gas — is that, well, it hasn’t budged one bit. “Japan has never changed our attitude toward issues of our territorial waters and land,” Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera tells TIME. “It is China today that is trying to change this.” But the latest tensions ratcheted up after the Japanese government nationalized three of the contested islands a year ago. The purchase was aimed, says the Japanese government, at preventing the islands from falling into the hands of Tokyo’s nationalist governor, who was threatening to buy the outcroppings from their private Japanese owners. (The tiny islands are also claimed by Taiwan.) Beijing took exception to the nationalization, and forays by Chinese planes and vessels have increased markedly since then. Abe’s administration is now considering stationing personnel on the disputed isles, which have been uninhabited since before World War II — a move that will surely further anger the Chinese. “We can’t avert our eyes from the reality: a flurry of provocations against our country’s sovereignty,” Abe said in mid-September, referring to Japan’s territorial spat with China. “I’m pushing for the regeneration of our country’s security by looking squarely at reality.”

Man With a Past
With his soft face and panda-set eyes, Abe, 59, is known as an obotchan, which roughly translates to “little boy,” referring to his privileged lineage as the son of a Foreign Minister and the grandson of a Prime Minister. In truth, there aren’t many leading politicians in Japan today who aren’t obotchan — nepotism flourishes in Tokyo’s halls of power. But Abe seems particularly weighted with a sense of his conservative family’s mission, particularly his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi’s desire to amend Article 9 of the constitution, which is read as banning Japan from possessing an offensive military force. “From a young age, Abe had it in his mind that he would be the one who would bring the postwar regime to an end,” says Hitoshi Tanaka, a former Deputy Foreign Minister.

Abe’s sense of history and destiny for Japan backfired for him during his first stint as PM. “Abe misread the public mood about nationalism,” says politics professor Nakano. “People were more concerned about the economy, and he focused on the wrong thing.” Abe’s popularity plunged, even as he pursued a patriotic agenda and supported a textbook that played down Japanese wartime atrocities. A year after taking office, amid financial scandals involving his Cabinet members, Abe resigned in tears. He later blamed a rare intestinal ailment for his retreat.

Abe’s surprise exit was hardly the kind of fortitude expected from a young political shogun. In his 2.0 version, he continues to sound the nationalist bell. In 2012, he visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s war dead, including top war criminals, are memorialized — although he has so far declined to worship there while serving as Prime Minister. (Abe’s grandfather Kishi was arrested as a suspected war criminal by Allied occupation forces but never charged.) During last year’s political campaign, Abe suggested the need to revise two official Japanese apologies for the nation’s cruel wartime record, including one for the imperial Japanese army’s systematic sexual enslavement of Asian “comfort women.”

This time, however, Abe’s popularity is high. About 7 in 10 Japanese have a favorable opinion of him, according to a July Pew poll — unusually robust in a nation that serially dumps its leaders after brief periods in office. In May, a self-assured Abe was even moved to clamber into the cockpit of a Japanese military jet and flash a thumbs-up sign. The resulting image wasn’t quite Michael Dukakis in a tank. But the notion of Abe as proud commander in chief felt forced — and it didn’t help neighborly relations that the jet trainer chosen for the photo op was numbered 731, the same digits as a notorious Japanese military unit that unleashed germ warfare on Manchuria.

Anti-Chinese sentiment is soaring in Japan. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of Japanese remain allergic to any military buildup, particularly those who personally experienced the ravages of war. Only a minority of Japanese support constitutional revision. There is also a grudging understanding that Japan — especially an aging, depopulating Japan — needs China economically far more than the other way around. “Our biggest national interest is reviving our economy, and Japan is not in a position to be isolated by this question of [wartime] history,” says former Deputy Foreign Minister Tanaka. “I am very concerned about these careless right-wing statements by people inside government.”

It’s true that Abe’s party triumphed in recent polls. But the LDP won the past two ballots with fewer votes than when it was trounced in 2009 by the former ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The LDP’s most recent electoral victories owed more to voters’ disgust with the DPJ than an endorsement of Abe’s worldview. “The last two elections were about the economy, the economy, the economy,” says Taro Kono, an LDP legislator. Still, the Abe administration has articulated a consistent theme: Japan’s economic and military futures are inextricably tied. “Abe is very up-front about his personal philosophy, which is that he’s interested in a strong state that can defend its people and compete internationally,” says Tobias Harris, a Washington-based Japan analyst with Teneo Intelligence. Harris notes the historical precedent of 19th century Japanese modernizers who reformed a once closed nation under the motto “Rich nation, strong military.” “[Those reformers] believed that if they didn’t modernize, they would be gobbled up by the imperial powers; Abe brings that thinking to the 21st century. That’s very dangerous.”

Right Is Might
One of the unlikely showcases of Japan’s military prowess is a radar facility that looms like a giant golf ball, atop a hill overlooking sugarcane fields and picture-postcard beaches. The SDF base, on Okinawa’s Miyako Island, is a frontline one, and its 160 personnel have been particularly busy since the Senkaku-Diaoyu tiff escalated last year. Living full time on the typhoon-battered base isn’t easy.

But the soldiers’ hardship posting is at least more appreciated now by the Japanese public. Approval for the SDF has skyrocketed in recent years, particularly after soldiers aided the 2011 natural-disaster-relief effort. A popular TV drama this year followed the fictional love lives of a female TV director and an SDF officer. In a nation obsessed with all things cute, the SDF promotes itself through cartoon mascots named Pickles and Parsley. (Pickles and parsley are strong but ultimately pleasing tastes, just like the SDF, apparently.) “People used to call us ‘tax robbers’ before,” says Air Self-Defense Force Major Yasuhisa Furuta. “Now the situation is totally different.” SDF enlistment is up, and its veterans even serve in parliament — the likes of Masahisa Sato, a mustachioed retired colonel, who commanded Japanese peacekeepers in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, Sato supports a constitutional revision. “When I entered the SDF 30 years ago, I never imagined that we could be discussing constitutional reform so openly,” he says. “Japan is becoming an ordinary country, and the SDF an ordinary military.”

That spooks many Okinawans, who inhabit what was once a kingdom called Ryukyu that paid tribute to imperial China. By the late 19th century, though, Okinawa had been absorbed into Japan. (Chinese academics and military officers have postulated that China has territorial rights not just to the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands but all of Okinawa.) At the end of World War II, in the horrific Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese military forced tens of thousands of Okinawans into combat, with some even compelled to commit suicide in the face of the Allied assault. Local animosity toward Japanese troops, even under the guise of the SDF, lingers — not to mention discomfort with the 25,000 Americans on U.S. military bases on Okinawan soil. “Japan is a very scary country, a warrior culture,” says former Okinawa governor Masahide Ota. “The most important lesson from the Battle of Okinawa is that the Japanese military will never protect the local people.”

On the island of Ishigaki, which has administrative jurisdiction over what Japan calls the Senkaku, Mayor Yoshitaka Nakayama appears open to building an SDF base to better protect the disputed islets. “I am concerned that China is trying to expand its territorial interests,” he says. “Since such a country exists in our neighborhood, we have to enhance our defense.” Kameichi Uehara, head of the local fishermen’s union, doesn’t see the threat. “I’ve never heard of any Chinese boats giving any trouble to us.” Local historian Shizuo Ota concurs. “I don’t think China has provoked the Senkaku issue,” he says. “It’s rightist groups from Japan that are causing most of the problems.”

Japan’s vocal rightists, who like to tool around Tokyo in vans that broadcast historical whitewashing, don’t help with Japan’s international image. “Ask anyone,” says Nariaki Nakayama, a conservative lawmaker, “and they will say that the Japanese are a peace-loving people who want to avoid war.” But Nakayama also denies that the Rape of Nanjing happened and believes that “comfort women” are a myth. One controversial Abe supporter is Toshio Tamogami, a retired SDF general who had to resign as head of the Air Self-Defense Force in 2008 after denying that Japan was an aggressor in World War II. He now helps lead an ultra-right-wing group called Ganbare Nippon, or “Go for It, Japan,” which has staged illegal landings on the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands. “Abe is completely different from his predecessors,” says Ganbare Nippon president Satoru Mizushima, who swam from a boat to the disputed islets last year. “He may be thinking, ‘Please, put your hands on the Senkaku. It will open the door to protecting our country by ourselves.'”

In July, Abe visited Miyako while on the campaign trail for the upper-house election. Base commander Lieut. Colonel Yasumasa Hayashi can’t remember too much of what the Prime Minister said when he praised the troops for being a “cornerstone of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” for the region. “I was too nervous to be meeting my commander in chief,” Hayashi admits. “But I feel great pride to be serving on the front lines of Japan.” Standing on a helicopter-landing pad at his tiny military outpost, Hayashi gazes out at the East China Sea. Just 200 km away are the disputed islands that have caused such friction between Japan and China. The seas are calm — for now.

— with reporting by Chie Kobayashi / Naha Air Base