The Liberal Cooption of Militarism: Japan’s Election in 2024

Strap in, readers; this is going to be a long one. As the world steadily jogs toward global conflict, military spending has ceased being a partisan issue and become a contest of who can spend more on bullets. The United States, as always in matters of warfare, has been increasing its military budget for decades, even as we have officially pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing illustrates this point more clearly than Vice President Kamala Harris’s promise to create the “most lethal” military force if elected this November. VP Harris is not alone in this variety of electoral promises; enter stage left, Japan’s new Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru.

After months of foundation-shaking scandals from his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), scandals that dethroned the proceeding three-year-long Prime Minister-ship of Fumio Kishida, LDP leadership elected Ishiba to reaffirm public trust in the party. The LDP has been the premier party of Japan since the country’s post-war governmental reorganization, winning nearly all of Japan’s elections since the party’s founding in 1955. As a result of the LDP’s long-term success, they have become a big-tent party for centrists, primarily the center-right. After the 2022 assassination of the Conservative-leaning Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the recent abdication of his conservative colleague Kishida, the liberal faction inside the party has ascended. Within this political crisis, Ishiba seeks to reform the party from its core.

He has an earned reputation as stoutly forward-facing in his social politics while being measured in his economic aims. Although he has moderated his beliefs since taking the hot seat as PM, Ishiba has claimed gay marriage to be a “human right” but made no promises to legalize it during his tenure and has also promised to expand women’s role inside the government, which comes in reaction to his competitor’s traditionalism and Japan’s appalling lack of women in the State. Ishiba has promised a general wage increase and tax reforms to mitigate the damage of economic deflation, which has been bleeding the country since the 1990s. None of this is particularly radical, yet one aspect of his platform is curious: the military budget is slated to receive its largest budget since the end of World War Two under his reign.

Ishiba continues over a decade of militarization efforts in Japan and is the culmination of rhetorical fearmongering about regional tensions. To have a popular liberal follow through on a conservative project is a sign of the times in this global climate, but how did Japan arrive at this intersection?

World War Two’s end meant military isolationism for Japan, with its defense guaranteed by the United States. Even in Japan’s 1947 Constitution, Article 9 explicitly states that Japan will have no “war-making” capabilities; only after the Chinese Civil War did the Self-Defense Force become official and remained minuscule until the 2010s. The late Shinzo Abe, the same conservative from earlier, managed to swing a “reinterpretation” of Article 9 in 2014, declaring a “Right of Collective Self-Defense.” That reinterpretation was set into law under Article 96 of the Constitution. Since then, the previously agreed upon 1% of GDP defense budget has only ballooned. The 2024 budget is the largest on record at a final price tag of 56 billion USD, with previsions made to acquire new F-35s from the United States and a smattering of other weapons, such as missile defense systems and long-range missile platforms.

Prime Minister Ishiba has promised further increases in defense spending, with no real opposition to his plans aside from the small Communist Party. It is no wonder that he is personally committed to this agenda item; Ishiba was himself the former Defense Minister and has been described in multiple sources as a “gunji otaku,” meaning “weapons nerd” or “military geek.” He is said to have been enamored with the armed forces and built model military vehicles as a child. In any other circumstance, I would say he was a compromise candidate within the LDP, but his unabashed love of arms made him a clear choice for conservatives and liberals within the party. That being said, completing his overall agenda depends on the snap election he called, with all projections showing a general loss for the LDP in parliament. To any of our readers who keep up with the news, this is shaping up to be similar to the snap election called by President Immanuel Macron in France, without the threat of fascist electoral gains.

The only real question is: why? Why does Japan need to be on the bleeding edge of military tech while never once firing a shot in combat for nearly a century? Well…all cards on the table, I will never claim to be objective. We all have biases, but I supply informational analysis in which I assess that the dollar bill lay behind the budgetary explosion. Defense Companies have a nasty habit of making their primary hobby obscene wealth extraction, followed by their second greatest hobby of using that profit to pay off government officials to open up more routes for their first. Being a one-party state, Japan has the easiest route to funneling cash into the hands of suggestable politicians who can, for example, reinterpret the constitution's language and expand the spending cap for defense. Arms bought from Modern Japan’s oldest ally, the United States—and to be transparent, all of the weapons purchased are from the Red, White, and Blue, to my knowledge. However, through statements and policy, the Japanese government has pointed out why they deemed ramping up necessary.

American global hegemony is not what it used to be, a decline spurred by Middle Eastern failures. At the same time, a new country has risen to fill that gap. China. China has grown and grown since the reforms of Deng Xiao-Ping in the 80s. They have become a powerhouse faster than the United States has declined. The tension created by this global changing of the guard has a weak point on the island of Taiwan. So, as China grows and its appetite for reintegrating Taiwan increases in equal measure, the United States feels more pressure, not only to secure its ally but also to contain China, its perceived adversary.

Usher in Joe Biden, attempting to create an Asian alliance. President Biden has spent his tenure roping together a South China Sea net with South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and others. Japan is a regional first responder in the case of Chinese action, and the United States has been leveraging its long-time diplomatic relations with Japan to keep firm its anti-Chinese commitments. This alliance has been long in the making; Former President Obama even praised the 2014 Article 9 reinterpretation because he knew it would create a more potent regional ally. Prime Minister Ishiba has even proposed an “Asian NATO,” to little fanfare from India and the United States. I suspect the United States’ disinterest is due to a lack of necessity; its regional allies are all primed for anti-Chinese actions if the time comes. Prime Minister Ishiba has stacked the deck internally for renewed Japanese Militarism despite his international proposition’s floundering. His staff is full of loyalists, including two fellow former defense ministers, and he is adamant about forming an official regional alliance. Returning to the theme of this piece, what happened to liberals? Why is war selling?

Japan, like all other liberal democracies since the beginning of the Ukraine War, has begun to prepare for the next large conflagration. China was an effective boogie man to sell the start of the rearmament process, but the blatant aggression of the Russian Federation in 2022 spawned global panic about the next war. Meanwhile, global economic instability has everyone on edge, and fear sells in these political environments. Long past are the halcyon days of pacifistic liberalism. The end of the Bush Era in America is what did it for us. VP Harris’s speech at the DNC proves that liberals are no longer doves.

Meanwhile, in Japan, over a similar amount of time, Shinzo Abe's long era disarmed the anti-war movement by using his place in the country's premier party to drag the country's politics to the right. While Ishiba is unique for his liberal tendencies within the LDP, he is still the leader of the center-right party. His militarism is a wave that, while he genuinely seems invested in it, he continues to ride because it has become the liberal norm.

When Shinzo Abe reformed the rules surrounding the Self-Defense Force in 2014, mass protests were held—some of the largest in the country’s history. The approval of Article 96 was in the hands of the parliament and not the people, so it passed. Public outrage quieted then ceased, leading to a lack of counter-messaging and voter apathy. Now, polls show that most Japanese people fear China enough to support the military buildup. When your country has only one party for most of its existence, it can choose to follow its constituent’s wishes. Without other anti-war options, the Japanese people have no other choice but to give in to the rhetoric. That is the story of the geo-political world in 2024. Countries’ leaders would prefer to invest in bombs and borders rather than hotels for diplomats. When the people are deprived of anti-war leaders, war will happen. When war becomes the norm, war will happen. It is with great fear that this writer reports that Liberal parties have dropped the anti-war movement in exchange for war profiteering, and it is even more disheartening that our leaders—like Ishiba—will seek it, even if we do not want it.