Expensive Japanese militarism

This video about World War II is called Rape Sex Slaves & Comfort Women: Japanese Atrocities in Asia.

By Peter Symonds:

Japanese government boosts military spending

17 January 2013

In office for less than a month, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government in Japan has swiftly adopted an aggressive strategic posture against China. It announced last Friday the first increase in military spending in more than a decade, with an emphasis on strengthening Japanese control over islands in the East China Sea contested by China.

The defence ministry foreshadowed a request for a 2.2 percent boost to its budget, to a minimum of 4.7 trillion yen ($US52.8 billion), for the next financial year, beginning in April. Japan already has the world’s sixth largest defence budget, despite observing a semi-official limit on military spending of 1 percent of gross domestic product

The government had previously announced an additional 180 billion yen for military hardware this financial year, as part of an emergency economic stimulus package. The new equipment is likely to include upgrades for F-15 fighter jets and early warning aircraft, additional patrol helicopters and an expansion of anti-ballistic missile systems. …

The Abe government plans to revise the so-called pacifist clause in the Japanese constitution, thus permitting the transformation of the country’s self-defence forces into a “normal” military—that is, one able to prosecute Japan’s strategic interests in Asia. …

Abe’s first overseas trip is in marked contrast to his first term as prime minister in 2006, when he visited China to patch up relations that had frayed under his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi had pursued an openly nationalist agenda, including visits to the controversial Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, and revisions to school textbooks to weaken or omit references to Japanese war crimes in the 1930s and 1940s.

During last month’s election campaign, Abe foreshadowed visiting the Yasukuni shrine and changing school texts, as well as modifying previous formal limited apologies for Japanese war crimes. These moves are certain to provoke protests from China, and potentially other Asian countries that suffered under Japanese military occupation.

CHINA has condemned the latest comments made by the United States over the disputed Diaoyu Islands in which Hillary Clinton said that Japan is under US protection: here.

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