Japan’s new National Defense Program Guidelines-what’s new, what’s old, what’s at stake?

In December 2010, Japan adopted the National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG). The guidelines outline the country’s 10-year defence strategy (previous such documents were issued in 1976, 1995 and 2004). The guidelines are aimed at equipping Japan’s Self-Defense Forces—SDF (“jietai” in Japanese) with the capabilities and tools to react to crisis scenarios that go beyond the defence of Japanese territory on the Japanese mainland. This means they are, for example, aimed at upgrading the armed forces and the country’s coast guard to be able to better protect and defend Japanese-controlled and disputed territory in the East China Sea (the Senkaku Islands, subject of a territorial dispute with China). The 2010 NDPG stipulate the re-location of military equipment and troops from the northern part of the country towards the south, including the southern island chains in the vicinity of mainland China and Taiwan. This partial re-location of Japan’s armed forces is above all motivated by China’s rapidly advancing military modernisation, its increasingly regular intrusion into Japanese-controlled territories in the East China Sea, and Beijing’s overall assertive and indeed aggressive policies related to territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas. However, Japan’s security and defence policies will, after the adoption of theNDPG, continue to remain strictly defensive in nature, i.e., the guidelines do not foresee the acquisition of offensive military equipment. “Japan will continue to uphold the fundamental principles of defence policy including the exclusively defensive defence policy and the three non-nuclear principles,” the guidelines read.