Is rearmament of Japan a myth or reality?

By Edward Neilan

TOKYO (JP): It is tempting for a journalist, after reading an absorbing and fascinating new book with its portrayal of history's most stunning naval buildup, to project into the future and to speculate "Might Japan do it again, build a naval force that could match or surpass Western navies?"

After all, Japan's vest-pocket "navy" of today, known as the Maritime Self-Defense Force, although restricted by inhibitions ranging from the country's no-war constitution to various threads of public opinion, very nearly equals in number of surface combat ships the U.S. Seventh Fleet, if you set aside carriers.

If history is any guide, Japan could mount a respectable carrier force within two or three years, sufficient to expand its already pronounced advantage over all other navies in the Asian region, except that of the United States.

This is one of the themes a reader might pursue from "KAIGUN: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941," by David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, U.S.A., 610 pp, 1997, US$49.95).

But upon visiting authors Evans and Peattie in the latter's Hoover Institution office on the Stanford University campus recently, it soon became apparent that they would not be party to any such speculation.

"The old navy constituted a mighty fighting force," Peattie said, adding, "Whereas the tiny Japanese maritime self-defense force plays a small role in preserving the security of Japan's home waters."

For the English reader in search of the authentic history of the Japanese Imperial Navy, it does not get any better than this. "Kaigun" is the signature work, presenting much new material and analysis, on one of history's greatest naval war machines.

The authors' meticulous research left them impressed: "To have observed the Japanese battle line in column on maneuvers in the northern Pacific during the inter-war years, to have watched the clouds of fighters and attack aircraft lift off the decks of six carriers into the early morning of Dec. 7, 1941 or to have viewed the vast bulk of the super battleship Yamato anchored in Truk lagoon early in the Pacific War, must have been among the great spectacles in modern naval history. Never again will Japanese naval power be so visually impressive."

Moreover, unlike the present JMSDF, the pre-war navy was a truly "imperial" force, projecting the aura of the emperor to the expanded boundaries in Asia of a true empire as well as being "emblematic of the rise of Japan as a world power."

Yet for both Americans and Japanese, the authors claim, the overriding aspect of the Japanese navy is its final defeat. "Indeed, it was not just beaten by the U.S. Navy, it was annihilated."

For those scholars on both sides of the Pacific who study the Japanese navy, "Its ultimate defeat is the ineluctable fact in the assessment of its capabilities, its combat performance and even its victories."

Stripped of academic niceties, it could be said the Japanese navy was born to lose.

The book gives perspectives from a variety of viewpoints that will mark it as a classic of the genre.

Where is the dividing line, and when does the technical capability of an economic superpower transform into the independent potential of a military superpower?

In the case of Japan, the question is not as new nor as academic as might be supposed.

Through 50 years of postwar alliance with the United States, Japanese bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists, media commentators, academics and coffee shop pundits have debated the advantages of kokusanka -- the domestic development and production of military weapons. The dispatch of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf immediately after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 was the first participation by the Japanese self-defense force in an international military operation.

The minesweepers were controversial at home and abroad, even though they were wooden ships of a design rarely built elsewhere.

Japan's maritime self-defense force has 28 minesweepers, all made with wooden hulls. Metal hulls of conventional ships attract submarines and mines.

Two companies, the Hitachi Zosen Corp. and the NKK Corporation, build the minesweepers. In recent years these companies have taken turns in constructing the one minesweeper ordered ever year by the JMSDF.

Each shipbuilder keeps specialists on minesweeper construction on its payroll, characteristic of the high costs of defense industry specialization based on performance rather than budget.

It is said that a U.S. M-1 tank costs only one-third of its Japanese counterpart, because Japan's policy of no overseas weapons sales rules out mass production.

Japan's domestic defense industry is maintained so that it can keep the import of defense equipment to a minimum.

But this example of kokusanka is said to have another motivation. Some politicians have said that to be a "normal country," Japan must have the ability -- including the weaponry -- to defend its sovereignty.

The writer is a Tokyo-based veteran analyst of Northeast Asian affairs and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.