Japan's self-defense force is better-equipped, I will grant, but there are a few reasons.
One is that there is always a higher level China could escalate to. I mean, in the end game they have nukes and Japan doesn't. But even if it didn't get to that level, China is a totalitarian regime with a history of brutally suppressing dissent, and I also assume that China would be willing to lose a lot more lives to make gains.
Japan is a high-functioning democracy, and has been one of the most peaceful advanced economies of the world since losing the war. Before that, yeah, they were a definite bad actor on the world stage. But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.
It is my personal opinion that there is almost no way that the people of Japan (where I live, though I am American) would support a war against China. Even if China just up and landed an occupying force on Japan's Senkaku islands.
In a democracy, that public support really matters. In a totalitarian regime, not so much.
I don't personally know that much about the military stuff -- how much would Japan's superior equipment matter in an actual conflict -- so I'd be interested to hear more knowledgeable people chime in. But in Japan, a war with China would be politically untenable unless China like, invaded Tokyo, or something. Which is highly unlikely.
As with the Philippines, I think the USA is the main deterrent to Chinese aggression. And these days it's a pretty shaky deterrent.
In a democracy, that public support really matters.
Indeed.
Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, my point wasn't that democracies don't wage wars -- just that they can't ignore the will of the citizenry (unless they don't actually have a democracy).
As an American, the USA's bottomless well of rah-rah nationalism any time they trot out the troops has always been a mystery. But it's definitely there, and I don't think any other country since the USSR has come close to the USA in terms of attacking other countries.
I also disagree with the comment below about a war-weary USA having a tepid response to China seizing a minor uninhabited American island. I think public support for a military response would be huge, like always.
What I was saying was that in Japan specifically, that knee-jerk support would not be there.
Huge support would be a massive understatement. Half the congress would be for an all out ICBM strike and other half would be for levelling the country and sending it back to stone age.
> But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.
Well, yeah. It's in their constitution.
> It is my personal opinion that there is almost no way that the people of Japan (where I live, though I am American) would support a war against China. Even if China just up and landed an occupying force on Japan's Senkaku islands.
Perhaps not over the Senkaku Islands, but I think that if China were aggressive toward one of the four main islands (or Okinawa), the Japanese people would definitely support war -- even if not in actual name. I was really surprised at the general sentiment toward the proposed amendment in that it was a lot more supportive than I personally would have expected from a heiwa-boke Japan.
Especially against China though, there's already a lot of dark, anti-China sentiment (especially with the recent chicken fiasco) that I feel like could be stirred up into support for a non-War armed conflict/proportional response... though I don't know how the people would act after seeing the results.
Edit: In addition, I feel like war-weary Americans would be similarly ambivalent about entering war against China if China tried to annex, say, Wake Island.
> As with the Philippines, I think the USA is the main deterrent to Chinese aggression.
This is for me personally the number one reason I don't think that China would be willing to escalate against Japan, actually. American bases in Japan can not only provide support, but attacks on them would draw America into the conflict necessarily.
Americans are weary of pointless, stupid wars involving people we never heard of in countries we can't find on a map.
But touch our territory, and you're going to wish you hadn't. It doesn't matter if nobody knows where Wake Island is or if nobody lives there. It doesn't matter if it's fairly unimportant. It's ours, and Americans are intensely territorial.
If China landed troops on Wake Island, I'm pretty sure that the less war-hungry side of Congress, whichever that may be at the time, would be calling for bombing campaigns, carrier task forces, and an immediate counter-invasion. The hawks would need to be bodily restrained from launching ICBMs.
Attacks on Japan would draw America into the conflict. We provide their defense by treaty (and vice-versa, for what it's worth - Japan is committed to help the US if it is attacked, although this would typically be in the form of logistics and money since they don't have a lot of military ahrdware or experience these days): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_an...
Funny, the Argentines felt that the British wouldn't respond to invading the Falklands. Most wars are a result of one government failing to understand how another government will respond.
I think you seriously underestimate Japanese willingness to fight.
Lets say China decides to call US bluff and lands Marines on Senkakus tomorrow. To do that they would need to sink multiple Japanese coast guard vessels and kill a lot of Japanese sailors. What next? Obama says something about how he is unhappy. Japan is now probably incapable of direct landing on Senkaku right now IF it is opposed. It is however more then capable to sweeping Chinese planes out of the sky in the area. In the air war tech and training >> numbers. The other aspect of the war will be naval and Japan operates the best submarine fleet in Asia, given freedom they would inflict horrendous losses on Chinese surface fleet.
Chillingly at the same time PM of Japan knowing that he was betrayed by US would give an order to weaponize Japanese stockpile of weapon grade material and in a matter of weeks? month? Japan will test multiple fusion devices. Now the real game begins.
In reality I do not think that China will play this game now, their leaders are not Putin and Japan is not Ukraine. I think confrontation or war between China and India and/or Japan will happen but not yet. 10-15 years from now?
Japan may not officially have nuclear weapons, but they do not lack the capability - if they decided to weaponize (which would never happen short of a Chinese existential threat), they could do so in a matters of days, not months - the nuclear knowhow is clearly there.
The rest of your point is fair - for Japan to go to war would take a fundamental shift in the country, and its questionable whether the Senkaku Islands would meet that level. China is an aggressive, scary power in a lot of ways, and we ought to be cognizant of the dangers it poses - and the Japanese (and the Vietnamese, and the Phillipinos) are.
"Days" seems way too short. I Googled a bit, and the pages that came up (see below) suggest between 6 months and 10 years.
The estimates vary depending on how many and what kind of weapons they would build. Apparently Japan has a small stockpile of weapon-grade plutonium, and a huge stockpile of less refined plutonium. So they could build a small number of bombs quickly (the 6 month estimate), but building more would require either designing the weapon around less refined plutonium (which increases the risk that it would not work) or building a refinement plant (several years). They would also need some way to deliver the weapons---the most difficult option is ballistic missiles, which gives the 10-year estimate, while cruise missiles on submarines would be faster.
> A nuclear triad — land- and sea-based missiles combined with weapons delivered by manned bombers — holds little promise in light of Japan's lack of geographic depth and the vulnerability of surface ships and aircraft to enemy action. That means fielding an undersea deterrent would be Tokyo's best nuclear option.
> Japan may not officially have nuclear weapons, but they do not lack the capability - if they decided to weaponize (which would never happen short of a Chinese existential threat), they could do so in a matters of days, not months - the nuclear knowhow is clearly there.
You don't make nuclear weapons in days. Unless you have no idea what you are talking about. Weapon grade uranium takes months to produce. Why do you think Iran has been trying for so long to make such material ?
Ok then. With that and since they've almost certainly designed a device and worked out the logistics just in case I'm quite willing to believe they could get a number of boosted fission devices assembled in less than a month.
Japan has one of the worlds largest stockpiles of plutonium. Nine tons stored at home, and thiry five tons stored in Europe waiting to be reprocessed into MOX fuel.
I wonder how confident the CPC is in the political stability of China. Conflict is a wildcard and it can have all sorts of consequences.
I don't really know how to evaluate the claim myself as a removed outsider, but there seems to be a pretty credible claim that politically, China is economic growth addicted. IE, any kind of stagnation or substantially reduced growth rate endangers the political status quo.
People standing over their 14 year old kids to get the grades expect a salaried lifestyle for that kid in 10 years that isn't available today. They are expecting economic growth to create it. If, when that kid is 19 and in University it starts to look like a white collar job for graduates is unlikely, this kid studying Business and International Studies is not going to achieve what his parents worked. If he finds himself with something they unanimously agree is beneath him….
> any kind of stagnation or substantially reduced growth rate endangers the political status quo.
OTOH, using (even engineering) an external crisis -- including outright war -- to redirect popular anger over current or expected domestic economic conditions is not unheard of.
I almost choked on that one. Yeah, a democracy when there's a change of prime minister every single year or less, can surely be defined as "high functioning". It's as functional as the 4th Republic was in France.
> But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.
They have unconditionally supported the US war operations in many theaters around the world, though. they have not taken directly taken part in conflict but support the US in their wars. That's just because their constitution prevents them to, not that they don't want it...
I don't judge the functioning of a democracy by how long a prime minister stays in office, I judge it by whether the citizens have the unfettered ability to vote, whether non-incumbents can get on the ballot, and whether election results accurate and largely free of fraud/corruption.
On all three of those metrics, Japan does better than, say, the United States.
If the will of the people is 'meh/who cares/none of the above', then that's a different problem, IMO.
> I judge it by whether the citizens have the unfettered ability to vote, whether non-incumbents can get on the ballot, and whether election results accurate and largely free of fraud/corruption.
Free of corruption, Japan? Really ? You have a twisted understanding of Japanese politics then.
And by the way, Japan is very much like the US in the fact that you have a bi-party system, with one party more often than not always in power. Hardly a good sign of a healthy democracy when there's so little choice available to voters.
Free of election-related corruption as in, the not-really-a-functioning-democracy kind of corruption. There is nowhere in the world where politics itself is free of corruption.
Japanese election results overwhelmingly reflect who actually got the most votes; I have never even heard that point contested.
And little choice? Two-party system? I wonder: have you ever actually seen a Japanese election?
There are so many candidates and parties now that it takes an hour just to google them all. Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japanese Communist Party, New Komeito, the Social Democratic Party, Nippon Isshin, the New Rennaissance Party, then we have the Green Wind Party and the Smile Party... and I am definitely missing a whole bunch more -- all of whom have actively serving winners in local government positions and the Japanese Diet.
And in most recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, where I live, the guy who won wasn't even in any of those parties, but AFAICT made his own party with only himself in it...
> As with the Philippines, I think the USA is the main deterrent to Chinese aggression. And these days it's a pretty shaky deterrent.
You must be kidding. The US military power is like 50 times what the Chinese can hope to come up with during a conflict. Even in 2014, if China were to try to take on the Pacific, they would be squashed like a mosquito if the US was to be involved. And believe me, they would be involved.
> In a democracy, that public support really matters.
I guess the American's population strong opposition to the Vietnam war or the second Iraq war says a lot about the validity of your comment. No, even democracies can go to war without much public support. Most democracies have actually special measures to go to war without any kind of popular vote.
One is that there is always a higher level China could escalate to. I mean, in the end game they have nukes and Japan doesn't. But even if it didn't get to that level, China is a totalitarian regime with a history of brutally suppressing dissent, and I also assume that China would be willing to lose a lot more lives to make gains.
Japan is a high-functioning democracy, and has been one of the most peaceful advanced economies of the world since losing the war. Before that, yeah, they were a definite bad actor on the world stage. But they haven't committed any military aggression toward any country in more than 65 years.
It is my personal opinion that there is almost no way that the people of Japan (where I live, though I am American) would support a war against China. Even if China just up and landed an occupying force on Japan's Senkaku islands.
In a democracy, that public support really matters. In a totalitarian regime, not so much.
I don't personally know that much about the military stuff -- how much would Japan's superior equipment matter in an actual conflict -- so I'd be interested to hear more knowledgeable people chime in. But in Japan, a war with China would be politically untenable unless China like, invaded Tokyo, or something. Which is highly unlikely.
As with the Philippines, I think the USA is the main deterrent to Chinese aggression. And these days it's a pretty shaky deterrent.