Neil Newman

Abacus | Pacifist Japan is quietly arming itself to the teeth, with China in its sights

Post-war Japan has amassed a considerable pile of armaments while flying under the radar. It already has more aircraft carriers than China – it just dumbs them down as ‘helicopter carriers’

With all eyes on Taiwan, Tokyo’s rising military spending may be contributing to the escalating arms race in the region in more ways than one

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Members of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force helicopter carrier JS Izumo rehearse a memorial ceremony for those who died during World War II. Photo: AP

Neil Newman

Published: 9:30am, 22 Nov 2021

From a very young age, I have had a fascination with aircraft. And before my swerve into finance, after years spent gluing balsa wood planes together to crash in the park, I got very serious about becoming an aeronautical engineer.

IT’S CLASSIFIED

On a visit to British Aerospace in Preston in 1979, I and a bunch of wide-eyed university students almost got into the Tornado F2 hangar where the brand new fighter jets were being assembled for the Royal Air Force. We were blocked by the engineering team because some “super-secret” AI.24 Foxhunter radar equipment was being installed. Many years later I found out that the F2s just had concrete ballast in the nose, internally nicknamed “Blue Circle” radar, until GEC-Marconi got the real thing to work.

Fast forward to 2021 and the UK is partnering with Japan to work on highly sophisticated fighter aircraft radar in a post-Brexit partnership that marks a step away from France and Germany, Britain’s traditional partners for cost-sharing military development. Clearly, the British have discovered Japan possesses some very valuable technology, and as we all know everything works in Japan – without rough bits of concrete in place of real technological breakthroughs.

Hong Kong sits in the middle of the most heavily armed part of the globe. And tensions have been rising over the past 20 years, with North Korea preferring to spend on the military rather than food, China rapidly accumulating advanced weaponry, and the 7th Fleet, Royal Navy, French Navy and Royal Australian Navy all parading their best equipment up and down the waterways. Yet all this time, Japan has not rubbed anyone’s noses in the fact that it has quietly accumulated remarkable amounts of military hardware – there are no military parades or showing-off.

Take aircraft carriers, for example, the core of a navy where forward attack strategies can be employed – that’s why they are called “carrier strike groups”. The Americans, of course, have more than anyone, with 11 ships. Britain, Italy and China have two each, and France, India, Russia, Spain and Thailand have one each. It’s not really obvious, but Japan has three, cunningly disguised as timid “helicopter carriers”. Now, two of them are being officially refitted for F-35B multirole fighters, a trick the South Koreans have also cottoned onto.