After decades of gradual military build-up by China, territorial disputes with China and Russia, and increasing concern about North Korea’s missile-strike capability, Japan is once again reinventing itself and rapidly moving from the pacifist stance …
In a year that saw a significant deepening of Japan–Australia relations, a watershed moment of 2022 was the revision of the Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation, first signed in 2007. The revised document lays …
France invented the attack helicopter in 1956. Sixty-seven years later, Japan has decided that the idea has had its day. ‘Elimination of obsolete equipment’ is the cruelly decisive headline above photos of a Bell AH-1 …
In December, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced the most ambitious expansion of military power in Japan since the creation of the country’s self-defence forces in 1954. Japanese defence spending will rise to 2% of …
Japan is unique among G7 nations in that it faces cascading threats from three hostile countries in its immediate neighbourhood. Russia, North Korea and China all have nuclear warheads and missiles that are increasingly advanced, …
