Japan, as I see it today, is a nation best known for its sushi, samurai, Anime, and tsunamis – among numerous other things reflective of its geography and culture. More than seventy years ago, however, it may seem unfathomable to the human imagination that this peaceful country just off the east shores of mainland Asia was once a feared and formidable military power, had once dominated as much as a quarter of the globe and was a hated enemy in the eyes of most of the world’s countries, not the least of which being the United States.

It also might seem hard for many to believe that through the 1930s and 1940s, this island nation was responsible for some of the worst mass genocides of the twentieth century – crimes against humanity which to this day Japan refuses to acknowledge, let alone apologize for. After 1945, the year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s role in the Second World War was ended. Furthermore, Japan’s days as a belligerent, warmongering nation were finally put to rest. For more than seventy years since Emperor Hirohito finally spoke out to his people to end their suffering from a hopeless conflict, Japan has been at peace with its neighbors in the Far East as well as most of its Western counterparts.

For more than seventy years, Japan has prospered as a democratic state while striving diligently towards becoming the world’s second largest economic giant of the twenty-first century. All of these accomplishments are due in no small measure to the postwar reconstruction policies set forth by the victorious Allied Powers after 1945. The United States, as it was the spearhead of the Allied war effort to defeating Japan, reaped much of the reward from taking down the last fascist regime within the Axis Tripartite. After four years of war and unspeakable atrocities lasting from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings, Americans and Japanese have buried the hatchet to pave the way for seven decades of friendly diplomatic relations between their two countries.

The most shocking change to hit Japan after 1945, however, was within its military policy. Through the course of the last seventy years, Japan has maintained a strictly peacetime military. As such, the reformed Japanese government has since drastically reversed its foreign policy to an extent where it has remained in a state of isolationism from all global affairs. That is, however, until two summers ago.

As of August 2014, following a landslide parliamentary vote, expansion of the Japanese military began taking place on the island of Yonaguni, part of the remote Yaeyama Islands located southeast of Japan’s mainland. The following year, however, in September 2015, the current Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, took his country’s giant rebound into militarization one more step further by proposing to return Japan to a more extroverted role in international politics. For the rest of the world, this move was nothing short of a surprising wake-up call. Japan’s inactivity on the international stage for more than half a century was the first time of any such incidence since before the country became an industrialized power after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The circumstances of the late-nineteenth century, however, were much different from how they are now. While Japan’s expansionist motives back then were driven by the desperate economic demand for natural resources, Abe asserts that the Japanese incentive for building up the country’s armed forces today are strictly for defensive purposes. Why should Japan, after seventy years of peace, all of a sudden be concerned with its national defense? To those who keep up with current events, the answer seems pretty clear-cut:

China.

It is no secret that China has been in the midst of an ambitious “island-building” project on the waters off its eastern shores. Japan, which sits fewer than 1,900 miles at its narrowest point from the Chinese mainland, has every right to feel unnerved by the growing presence of Asia’s second-largest military power at its backdoor. While the Sino-communist regime has continued to broaden the scope of its maritime influence into the neighboring East China Sea, Japan has been forced to leave the comfort of its mainland to buffer Chinese efforts towards a vast, man-made island empire. Itsunori Onodera, the Japanese Defense Minister, has emphasized that the military build-up in Yonaguni is the first step of a large-scale operation “to properly defend islands that are part of Japan’s territory.” Since as early as 2012, some of these islands have been classified as disputed territory, to which the rival governments in Beijing and Tokyo hold mutual claims. In the South China Sea, meanwhile, Beijing’s involvement there has also knocked heads with other Asian countries from Taiwan to Malaysia who share trade interests in the area. Diplomatic tensions amongst China and her neighbors have therefore reduced the entire western rim of the Pacific to a geopolitical powder keg, set to go off at any given moment. If a war were to suddenly break out, it is already a foregone conclusion that Japan will be at the forefront of resistance to the Chinese juggernaut.

History cannot deny that China and Japan were not always the best at following the principle of “love thy neighbor” when it came to foreign relations. For the last 120 years, the hands of both nations were covered in each other’s blood on two separate occasions: their first major conflict, fought between 1894 and 1895, and then again more than forty years later in the better-known Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). It was during the second war, however, where the long-lasting animosity between Asia’s two industrial frontrunners officially kicked off. It was during the second war where the history books mention some of the worst atrocities committed by Japan’s armed forces against Chinese civilians, not the least of which being the infamous “Rape of Nanking” in which Japanese soldiers tortured and murdered virtually every living man, woman, and child in what was then China’s capital city. Back then, however, it was Japan who was the aggressor and China the victim. Today, it may seem that both sides have reversed their stances as conflict in the Pacific gradually unfolds. Japan, this time, claims to be the one on the defensive. For the past two years, the country’s devotion to protecting her borders has proven just as fanatical and hardworking as it was seventy years earlier.

Initially, Abe’s response to the consolidation of China’s military might on Japan’s western flank has involved mustering a substantial force of ground troops, long-range aircraft, amphibious assault vehicles, and helicopter carriers. But the Prime Minister has not stopped there. A new radar station was also constructed on the grounds of Yonaguni so to “allow early warning of missiles and supplement the monitoring of Chinese military movements” from reportedly as far as 93 miles away. In July 2015, Abe announced that his plans for globalizing the Japanese military are expected to be put into effect until the year 2019 at the expense of 24.7 trillion yen (240 million US dollars). The most divisive factors, however, are those who support Japan’s decision, and those who oppose it. In terms of opposition, China is unsurprisingly at the top of Japan’s newfound list of enemies; within the past year, several Chinese officials in the defense ministry have projected a series of warnings to the Japanese government to “take seriously the security concerns of its Asian neighbors” and, in regards to the memory of Japan’s militant past, to consider “profound lessons from history”. Based on China’s remarks, it seems clear that Japan is once again being held accountable as the aggressor. Elsewhere in Far East Asia, countries like South Korea and others who were once subjects of tyrannical occupation by the Japanese have good reason to question the motives of their former imperial overlord. Even in Japan itself, public opinion over military expansion has been a complicated state of affairs.

While the Prime Minister continues to emphasize that national security is the basis of the arms buildup, many of his people, in Japan and its external island territories like Yonaguni, are nonetheless unpleased with the country’s drastic abandonment of its peacetime status. Though it has promised that the rearmament and deployment of Japan’s forces overseas will shine a positive light on the economy at home, the parliament’s decision was received by others as an invitation for war on Japan’s own doorstep. Many have openly protested since the bill for military expansion was ratified by parliament. Nevertheless, Abe and his other elite supporters in the Japanese government are not alone. Some of Japan’s major allies on the world stage have openly welcomed the return of the “Rising Sun” as a military power. The most obvious, and most powerful, of Japan’s comrades is the United States.

Why should the American people care about what is happening on the other side of a vast ocean that separates their shores from Asia’s by thousands of miles? The reasons, in fact, are more significant and more numerable than we might think. During a joint session held by Congress last September, both Republican and Democratic senators agreed in a statement that, “The new measures adopted by Japan today will contribute to international peace and security while strengthening the vital alliance between our two countries”. China, while a powerful economic ally of the United States, has already recently antagonized American interests in the Pacific by expanding its chain of islands. Japan, on the other hand, has proven itself a strong commercial partner as well as a dependable agent of peace alongside the United States since the end of the Second World War. The Obama administration has been a fundamental supplier of American-made weapons to Japan in the last couple years; thus far, Abe’s five-year plan for military expansion has resulted in the shipment of modern-day aircraft like the F-22, F-35, and Global Hawk drone that is being manufactured through US assembly lines in US factories.

For the United States, the greatest concern revolving around the debacle between China and Japan – one which all but a few may tend to forget – is that American lives may be at risk if a war does break out. The bulk of the United States’ overseas territories are in the Pacific, where almost half of which are currently being used as active military bases. As such, American soldiers deployed to these bases tend to live there for an extended period of time and, more often than not, will have their families living on base with them. The island of Guam, roughly 1,600 miles from Japan, is the closest US territory to the Asian continent. If China makes a move that escalates into all-out war, and if that war boils down to ‘putting boots on the ground’, US troops from Guam and the more distant territories like the Northern Marianas and Samoa will be the first to enter the fight.

Right now it is still uncertain as to whether or not a conflict will be avoided, and many questions have yet to be answered. Can China be negotiated out of its continuous trespassing over the boundaries of its neighbors? Are Japan’s reasons for military expansion purely justified by the sake of its national defense? More importantly, will a battle between Asia’s two leading economic powers ultimately transpire into a full-fledged world war with China on one side versus Japan, the United States, and a few major Asian countries on the other? From what we can infer at the moment, China seems reluctant to halt its advances in the Pacific while Japan remains diligent in its progress towards fortifying its borders. Hopefully, in the near future, the United Nations will finally step in to establish a mutual compromise for peace between the two nations. Hopefully, if such a peace is achieved, all thoughts of a probable third world war can be forgotten. The days of Japan’s mass genocide that once bloodied China’s soil and the kamikazes that once terrorized the skies above the Pacific have already been set in stone for more than seven decades. Hopefully in the months to come, the hostilities that have been building up for the last two years will somehow be put to rest before the world is forced to suffer through an eclipse of one of the darkest moments in mankind’s history.