In a weekend speech that struck back at Beijing’s claims of a “new militarism” emerging in Japan, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told an audience of defense officials from across the globe that nothing could be further from the truth.
But there was something missing from Koizumi’s address: a direct mention of China.
“There is a country that has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers. Japan has neither of such weapons. And yet Japan is labeled ‘new militarism.’ Isn’t it strange?” the defense chief said Sunday during the Shangri-La Dialogue regional security summit in Singapore, in a thinly veiled rebuttal of Beijing’s claims that Tokyo is repeating the steps that led it into World War II.
While Koizumi stressed that Japan’s reputation as a pacifist nation “will not be shaken by disinformation and information manipulation” — a jab at China’s claims that Tokyo’s defense buildup is a “menace, threatening regional peace and stability” — his address also emphasized that “Japan’s door to dialogue is always open.”
A senior Japanese defense official later said that Koizumi had “reviewed this speech from start to finish, including what to say and how to phrase it,” highlighting a careful approach that apparently sought to avoid unnecessarily angering Beijing as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government grapples with how to reinvigorate ties.
Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, characterized Koizumi’s approach as Tokyo “demonstrating that it is acting like a reasonable neighbor that is not seeking provocation, and its efforts to defend its interest should be seen in that context.”
“Should the PRC continue to couch these steps as ‘militarism,’ Beijing could end up painting itself as the unreasonable party,” he added, using the acronym for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.
The reticence to directly name China and the emphasis on dialogue came as Koizumi’s counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, delivered his own speech that analysts said was remarkable for language that was noticeably softer on China than an address a year ago, when he warned of an imminent and “real” threat posed by Beijing to democratic Taiwan.
In Saturday’s address, the U.S. defense chief struck a markedly more conciliatory tone toward the rival superpower, saying that relations are “better than they’ve been in many years” and pointing directly to last month’s Beijing summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Ryo Sahashi, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, said that while Koizumi’s address and the exchanges that followed “surely took into account the short-term stability in U.S.-China relations evident in Secretary Hegseth’s own speech and at the recent Beijing summit … they…