In Japan, It’s Active [Missile] Shooter Drills

 

In Japan, It’s Active [Missile] Shooter Drills

At Least for Its Outer Islands

The People’s Republic of China is the regional bully, seeking hegemony over all its neighboring seas, much of the fish and mineral wealth in those waters and control over all its neighboring sea lanes. A majority of those claims are either in international waters or waters that have long belonged to other countries.

China has manufactured a militarized island in the Spratly chain by dumping millions of tons of sand and rock to an existing minor outcropping. With its economy in shambles – unemployment hitting the highest in this century, banks and real estate monoliths failing – President Xi has both aligned himself with Putin’s Russia and Kim’s North Korea as well as amped up his claims over total ownership of Taiwan… a distraction from his man-made economic chaos. But that distraction has made life very difficult for many in the region… recently including Japanese islands that are closer to the PRC than the main islands of that nation. Xi wants them to kowtow to him.

There’s been a love-hate relationship between locals and US forces stationed on southern Japanese islands. Marines stationed on Okinawa have created legal maelstroms, from drunken conduct to serious felonies. Locals have often protested against that American military presence. But there is a new necessities to those American bases.

Following its succumbing to pressure from ambitious and aggressive military leaders in WWII, headstrong and filled with visions of the triumph of the Bushido warrior expanding Japan’s power over the entire eastern and southeastern Asian region, Japan eschewed a repetition of that disastrous past. Even as the West, mainly the United States, countered Japan’s earlier expansion into the Korean Peninsula in 1905 (fully subjugating and annexing that territory in 1910), her violent conquest in mainland China, including the notorious “Rape of Nanking” in 1937, and massive military build-up by cutting of that island nation’s import of Indonesian oil and rubber.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was intended to decimate America’s naval dominance by destroying most if not all of our capital ships, notably battleships, heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers. The short conflict, the Japanese believed, would be resolved by opening free importation of those raw materials Japan desperately needed. It almost worked, but our carriers were off in the Aleutian Islands and escaped that raid. Japan’s folly ended four years alter in a combination of air attacks – the incendiary decimation of Tokyo in March and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Post-WWII Japan pledged to avoid rebuilding an offensive and aggressive military, allowing only defensive forces. Many in Japan saw no reason for US forces to remain anywhere on Japanese soil and banned nuclear weapons being maintained on her lands for decades.

The WWII destruction we heaped upon the Japanese was a horrible lesson learned. The “sleeping giant” was indeed filled with a “terrible resolve.” Yet China’s growth was troublesome for Japan; the two nations were traditional enemies. Japan’s “why can’t we just get along” mantra met the expansionist ambitions of China’s most recent Maoist incarnation, Xi Jinping hell-bent on building the most powerful navy in the world exercising total control of the entire eastern Asian region.

The quiet air of some of Japan’s most tranquil and seemingly idyllic islands, like Ishigaki island pictured above, are beginning to be shattered by wailing sirens and blue uniformed government officials shouting emergency directions to shocked and fearful residents. It is just part of new “preparedness” against possible PRC aggression against Japan, as that small island nation joins its regional peers in defiance against China’s undisguised territorial ambitions, with a strong PRC desire to drive Western fleets and airbases from the region.

Reporting for the March 3rd Los Angeles Times, Stephanie Yang explores this new anti-PRC movement during a practice drill on that tiny island: “[The] the only real urgency came from a man in a blue uniform, jogging through the confused crowd… ‘One more time,’ he called out through a megaphone… When the sirens wailed anew, a voice rang through the park: ‘A missile was just launched. Please evacuate immediately.’…

“‘Nowadays, you never know what might happen,’ Sano, a 37-year-old City Hall employee, said after the drill. ‘Not just in Ishigaki, but wherever you are in Japan.’… As geopolitical tensions in Asia grow more fraught, Japan has boosted military spending to record highs, and fear has permeated even some of the country’s most remote islands… ‘The threat is that Ishigaki is within range of North Korean and Chinese missiles,’ said Mayor Yoshitaka Nakayama, who wants to expand the drill to an islandwide evacuation rehearsal. ‘It is important to strengthen our defenses, even though it may increase tensions.’

“With the regional risks compounding, Japan has veered sharply from the anti-militarist stance it adopted after World War II. A defense strategy it released in December 2022 called for doubling military spending by 2027 and developing long-range missile capabilities.

“Japan is building up its military bases — including in Ishigaki and nearby islands — and allowing the U.S. armed forces to expand an already extensive footprint in the nation. It’s trying to calm citizen protests over an increased troop presence and a debate over whether the expansion will draw more danger to Japan, rather than defend it. And it is preparing its people for worst-case scenarios, with hourlong drills like the one on Ishigaki… While the secluded tropical tourist destination of Ishigaki may seem an unlikely target for attack, it is only 200 miles from Taiwan — the self-ruled island that Japan’s historical rival China claims as its own in increasingly aggressive displays.”

Many of the nations in the region, particularly Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines – also share that enduring that love-hate relationship with US military bases – yet look to the United States as their umbrella against a very aggressive new China with an evil, power-grab gleam in its eye. Xi delights in using his sea and air power to tease and remind locally stationed US forces of his growing power.

And like our European allies, the leaders of these smaller Asian nations wince and quiver in fear at the possibility of the reelection of Donald Trump, an isolationist with a deep and obvious affection for ambitious and unscrupulous regional dictators. He does seem to care that such autocrats want nothing more than to marginalize the United States and watch her jump to the command of those global strong men. And Xi is the strongest of them all, even as his nation suffers from his economic mismanagement.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder what it is about MAGA leaders who simply don’t want to study history and appear destined to repeat its mistakes.