Tokyo’s moves further proof the past is not past, but present

The ghost of empire is rattling its saber again in Tokyo — and this time it comes wrapped in supply-chain jargon and startup-friendly procurement rules. Under the Sanae Takaichi government, Japan is performing a careful linguistic waltz: “economic security”, “self-reliance”, “diversification”. Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi openly called for a “China-free” supply chain for defense equipment on Friday, baselessly citing China’s “export controls” as an excuse.

But strip away the “diplomatic poetry” and the picture sharpens. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is loosening restrictions on exporting lethal weapons. It speaks less of prudence and more of a country cutting the ropes of its postwar “pacifist” moorings.

It is an extraordinary pivot for a nation whose Constitution renounces war as a “sovereign right”. Now, the Takaichi government is greasing the skids for arms exports that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, while fast-tracking defense start-ups like it were a Silicon Valley pitch day.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has issued two rounds of export control and restrictive measures recently, placing a total of 40 Japanese entities on control and watch lists.

The measures target a narrow range of companies and apply only to dual-use items, leaving normal trade untouched. The Export Control Law of China and updated dual-use regulations enable precise controls and even removal from the control and watch lists upon compliance.

But nuance is beyond Tokyo’s ken. The focus there is on “freedom” from “dependence”, from “restraint”, from the inconvenient memory of what unrestrained militarism once wrought.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning has warned that Japan’s moves to ease the rules of limiting weapons exports lay bare right-wing ambitions to breach the postwar international order. Her concern is not merely rhetorical.

In recent years, Japan’s right-wing politicians have flirted with the idea of revising Japan’s three nonnuclear principles, expanded defense budgets beyond 2 percent of GDP, and reinterpreted the right to “collective self-defense”. Now comes the supply-chain “decoupling” that aims to enable a war machine to run carefree — an industrial precondition for strategic autonomy, or for something darker, depending on your reading of history.

While more developed economies realize “decoupling” with China is impossible, Japan is seeking “insulation”. The military signaling grows louder. Japan plans to deploy medium-range surface-to-air missiles on Yonaguni Island — just 110 kilometers from the Chinese island of Taiwan — by 2030.

Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesman of China’s Ministry of National Defense, has called Japan’s trajectory “reckless” and urged vigilance against neo-militarism. He invoked history as a warning: Japan’s past aggressions were also justified as “defensive” necessities.

The choreography is familiar. Threat inflation. Industrial mobilization. Legal reinterpretation. International reassurance campaigns. Tokyo is creating the very instability it claims it seeks to deter.

What makes this moment chilling is not any single policy but the cumulative drift. A missile battery here, a procurement reform there, all dressed as responses to “China factors”. Together they sketch the outline of a Japan shedding the constraints that strictly defined its post-1945 identity.

The tragedy of the postwar Asia-Pacific is that history never stays buried; it seeps through Tokyo’s policy papers and procurement plans. If Tokyo continues to walk down a path toward arms exports, supply-chain “decoupling” and forward missile deployments, it risks convincing its neighbors that the past is not past — merely paused. And once that suspicion hardens, no amount of rare-earth diversification will refine it away.