The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) held its 2025 summit in Malaysia last weekend. The overriding theme was to restore open trade as a driver of prosperity in a fractured, Trumpian world.
Away from the cameras, in chambers on the periphery of the gathering, were developments that may have a significant bearing on the region and the rest of the world. One of these has to do with Japan’s apparent resumption of militarism. This “return” is not exactly correct, though; it never really went away …
Away from the public images of summitry, Japan, one of Asean’s “dialogue partners”, has reportedly been resuming the militarism it abandoned after 1945 by “loosening arms-export restrictions” while ramping up efforts to reshape Southeast Asia’s security landscape. Two closely related things deserve consideration: Japan’s role as one of the Axis powers in World War 2, and its conduct in East and Southeast Asia during that period.
Bear in mind, too, that the other Axis power, Germany, is building what Chancellor Friedrich Merz described in May as “the most powerful conventional army” in Europe. Japan and Germany are “remilitarising”. The two countries were the greatest threat to the world in 1935-45 — the period during which so many of the current problems in the world gestated.
Japan is doubling spending on defence, acquiring counterstrike capabilities and reducing arms export restrictions while focusing on reshaping Southeast Asia’s security landscape. The country’s “security identity is undergoing its most dramatic change since 1945”, writes Nguyen Truong Giang, a researcher in Tokyo.
With those actions Japan appears to be pushing back against Chinese and Southeast Asian memory, discarding its mask of postwar pacifism once and for all. In some sense German and Japanese pacifism was all smoke and mirrors anyway.
During World War 2 Japan invaded and occupied China and most countries in Southeast Asia. Japanese brutality in those countries in 1930-45 remains vivid in many minds: the “Rape of Nanking”, the biological and chemical warfare, and human experimentation on Chinese people by the Japanese army’s notorious Unit 731 are remembered in the same way that Europeans remember Nazi atrocities. After the Japanese invaded Malaya in December 1941 they committed mass atrocities, including the rape of native women, and forcefully established brothels to “service” their troops on the Malay peninsula.
After 1945, Japan and Germany presented themselves as pacifists, but that mask often slipped when Washington sought assistance for its wars. Japan and Germany simply outsourced war. For example, Japan contributed about $13bn to Washington’s efforts during the Gulf War. Germany added $9bn-$10bn to “the war effort”, with logistical support in Turkey. Before that Japan provided logistical support for the US war against the Vietnamese.
And so, as we ponder Japan’s militarism redux, it’s worth remembering that war is a protean activity, which mutates and finds convenience behind the fig leaf of pacifism. Outsourcing war, paying others to put boots on the ground, is a continuation of war.
There is a deep tradition of war in the history of Germany and Japan. One useful way of understanding war and Japan is to read the gunki monogatari (Japanese war stories), which started as far back as 794 CE.
Japanese militarism redux is less a “cyclical return” than it is a centuries-old continuation of war by different means. Japan may not have put boots on the ground since 1945, but it has put money on the table. Its latest manoeuvre is to sell weapons and reorganise the security of the Southeast Asian landscape.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.