The 2020s and Its Historic Shift: Japan’s Evolution
By: George Friedman
In “The Next 100 Years,” I asserted that Japan was the third and least absurd nation that would begin to emerge as a major power in the 2020s.
It was the least absurd because it had become the second largest economy in the world after World War II, behind only the United States, only to be overtaken by China in 2010 and by Germany more recently.
Yet Japan was – by choice – a fairly weak military power.
The end of World War II introduced a fundamental change in Japanese culture.
Japan entered its role in the conflict in 1931 when it invaded the Chinese region of Manchuria.
By 1937, Japan expanded its presence in China and, in time, attacked other Asian nations.
The reason for the attacks was economic.
Japan lacked the natural resources needed to build a modern economy, so it had to import oil, steel and various other minerals from abroad.
This put Japan in a vulnerable position: If any of the countries Tokyo patronized were conquered by another power or were otherwise unable to supply materials for any reason, the Japanese economy would be profoundly undermined.
To Japanese leaders, wars of conquest were geopolitically essential, even if a third power like the United States intervened.
Apart from geopolitical interest, Japanese culture celebrated the warrior as the noblest of men, war as the noblest undertaking, and dying in a war as the noblest act.
This was a case in which geopolitical imperatives and cultural norms aligned.
Japan needed to guarantee the flow of natural resources, and the culture embraced war as leading to inevitable victory and moral virtue.
The United States' defeat of Japan had two effects on Japan.
First, having lost the war, its economy and military crushed, Japan was left impoverished and powerless.
Many countries have suffered this fate, of course, but in Japan, the defeat led to cultural devastation as well.
Being beaten and occupied forced a radical transformation of the nation’s very nature.
In an extraordinary shift, Japan reversed its values.
It adopted a culture of pacifism.
Whereas merchants had once ranked below the warrior, businessmen were now at the top of the pecking order.
They saw the military as something that was morally repulsive.
And with the hatred of war as a new moral principle, Japan could not become a significant power, even if it had wanted to.
But by 2009, when I published “The Next Hundred Years,” Japan had reluctantly begun to rebuild its military, albeit to an extremely limited extent, even when Washington demanded it rearm as West Germany had.
Indeed, Tokyo did as little as the U.S. could tolerate, all while it grew to be an economic powerhouse through massive exports to the U.S. Some even referred to the damage this inflicted on the U.S. auto industry as “Japan’s revenge.”
In other words, Japan’s economy was humming, and there was a general consensus that its aversion to war and the deliberate dilapidation of its military meant that rearming and reemerging as a military power was impossible.
My own view was that, regardless of cultural norms, Japan’s economic power could always be overcome by reality.
The death of Mao in 1976 opened the door to China’s economic growth.
In 1989, the Japanese economy entered a period of crisis, and by 2010, the Chinese economy had become larger than Japan’s.
China had become Japan’s economic equal in size (if not in per capita income) and was rapidly developing a military force.
Tokyo modestly increased military spending, mostly because of U.S. pressure.
My analysis at the time was that the culture would change again near the middle of the decade for two reasons.
The first was that Japan would come to see the U.S. as having become much more cautious in its military obligations to other nations, and that Japan would feel increasingly vulnerable to Chinese economic and military power.
The second reason was that the generation that had experienced the humiliations of World War II would have passed away, and the reflexive hatred of all things martial would do the same.
My theory then and now is that culture and ideology are both overridden by geopolitical reality.
And the reality is that Chinese economic and military power will continue to rise, and as the U.S. reduces its appetite for foreign conflicts, Japan will have no option but to beef up its military.
In fact, it’s already started.
Already, it’s the 10th largest military in the world, and the government has said it will double the size of its military budget by 2027.
(The announcement was met with little political or cultural resistance.)
Japan will not return to the pacifist culture it adopted in 1945.
The growth of the Japanese defense system will be based on missiles, drones, satellites, advanced naval vessels and so on, backed by a rapidly growing defense industry.
Given the evolution of U.S. foreign and military policy, Japan has no choice but to increase its military power; the geopolitical model of morality is that there is nothing worse than a country being rich and weak.
Therefore, I feel comfortable that my predictions concerning Poland, Turkey and Japan are reasonably accurate, and that all three are emerging as major regional powers.
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