TOKYO - Despite a detente on the Korean peninsula and warming bilateral ties with China, Japan on Tuesday (Aug 28) described its security environment as "increasingly severe".
North Korea has not fired a single missile nor conducted any nuclear test this year. In June, Japan and China began a joint conflict hotline to stave off an accidental military clash in the East China Sea.
Even so, Japan's Defence Ministry said the threat to the country's security had worsened since last year's review due to more tangible and acute destabilising factors such as the impasse on Pyongyang's denuclearisation and the expansive military might of China and Russia.
"There have been no specific actions by North Korea on the abandonment of its nuclear weapons and missiles. The Chinese military - with improved capabilities - has advanced into the oceans," Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera told a news conference. "We want the Japanese citizens to know that the security environment surrounding us is serious."
The 564-page Defence White Paper also pointed to more 'grey zone' situations that are "neither pure peacetime nor contingencies over territory, sovereignty and economic interests".
It pointed to its territorial disputes with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islets, with South Korea over the Takeshima/Dokdo islands, and with Russia over four islands known collectively as the Northern Territories/Southern Kurils.
Seoul on Tuesday protested against the White Paper due to Japan's claims over the South Korea-controlled islands, saying that "repeating such unjustifiable and groundless allegations over Dokdo will not be helpful at all in building forward-looking relations".
Tokyo's defence document also noted that Japan's Air Self-Defence Force scrambled 500 times against Chinese jets and 390 times against Russian jets last year.
"There has been a noticeable trend among neighbouring countries to modernise and reinforce their military capabilities," it said.
The White Paper comes days before the Defence Ministry is due to ask for a record budget of 5.3 trillion yen (S$65.02b) for fiscal year 2019, which begins next April. This will include the initial cost of buying the United States-developed Aegis Ashore land-to-air missile defence system. The sum, first reported by Jiji News Agency last week, which quoted insiders, is over 100 billion yen larger than the budget for the current fiscal year.
The Aegis Ashore system was meant to defend against incoming missiles from North Korea.
The White Paper stressed that North Korea still possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons even while acknowledging that it was "significant" that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made a pledge in writing to pursue the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula after his summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June.
As such, there has been "no change in our basic recognition concerning the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missiles", the ministry said.
The Japanese paper comes days after Mr Trump publicly acknowledged for the first time that negotiations with Pyongyang have hit a snag by cancelling a planned fourth visit by his top diplomat Mike Pompeo to North Korea at the weekend.
The Japanese defence ministry stressed that it was crucial to closely monitor North Korea for "concrete action" towards denuclearisation, given how Pyongyang has conducted three nuclear tests and fired 40 ballistic missiles since January 2016, some of which have flown over Japan.
Mr Onodera said on Tuesday: "We cannot simply overlook the fact that it possesses and fully deploys several hundred missiles that put nearly all of Japan within range."
The White Paper prompted North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) to lash out at Japan for "making desperate efforts to worsen the climate of peace, a worldwide trend, at any cost".
Tokyo's defence ministry, in its document noted China's moves to avoid an unexpected military clash with Japan. But it also pointed to the rapid modernisation of the People's Liberation Army and its enhanced military assertiveness in the region as security threats.
It also noted Moscow's militarisation of the disputed islands north of Hokkaido, with the deployment of surface-to-ship missiles and the redesignation of a civilian airport to allow military use.
The Aegis Ashore system has proven to be a roadblock in Japan's cultivation of warmer bilateral ties with Russia. Tokyo insists that it will strictly be for national defence, but Moscow sees it as a US ploy to spy on them.
Given that countries in North-east Asia have been eyeing each other's defence strategy with suspicion, defence expert Tosh Minohara of Kobe University expects an ongoing arms race in the region to intensify.
"The current situation is a momentary lapse, a lull so to speak. We could be in a moment which is so precipitous that all hell can break loose at any time," he told The Straits Times.
