‘Gravest situation since the war’: Fumio Kishida urges military spending boost

Fumio Kishida has warned Beijing represents a ‘great strategic challenge’ to Japan and the surrounding region.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has warned China poses a strategic challenge to the region. Picture: AFP.

Japan’s prime minister has warned that the country’s ability to defend itself against China requires a massive increase in military spending as he tried to convince the public that tax rises were needed.

“We face the most severe and complex security environment since the end of the Second World War and the question of whether we can protect the people’s lives in an emergency,” Fumio Kishida said at the opening session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament.

He added that China represented “an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge” to the peace and security of Japan and the region.

In the past few months Japan has emerged from its official policy of pacifism, laid out in the country’s postwar constitution, which has governed its security strategy for three quarters of a century.

Last month Kishida’s government announced that it would increase the defence budget to 2 per cent, the NATO standard, by 2027, the equivalent of 43 trillion yen (AUD$472bn). New spending will include long-range cruise missiles capable of “counterstroke” against rocket bases in China or North Korea, and a joint project, with Britain and Italy, to develop a “future fighter jet”.

Beijing and Pyongyang have condemned the moves as a provocation, given Japan’s imperial past. However, Kishida said yesterday: “I make it clear that there will not be even a slightest change from Japan’s non-nuclear and self-defence-only principles and our footsteps as a peace-loving country.”

His government claims that three quarters of the new budget will be generated by budgetary reforms. However, it is also proposing the highest-ever annual national budget for the year at about pounds 711 billion. The inevitable increases in tax are provoking anxiety and opposition, even in Kishida’s ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party.

Shunichi Suzuki, the finance minister, pleaded on Sunday for passage of the new budget. “We face a fiscal situation that is increasing in severity at an unprecedented level,” he said. “Public finance is the foundation of national trust. It is essential that we ensure we have the fiscal space to prevent Japan’s credibility and the livelihoods of its people from being undermined in times of emergency.”

Kishida acknowledged the other great challenge faced by his government: a shrinking and rapidly ageing population in which a dwindling number of taxpayers have to support social security obligations towards a growing number of elderly people.

“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions,” he said. “It is now or never when it comes to policies regarding births and child-rearing; it is an issue that simply cannot wait any longer.”

The Times