The ship-slaying missiles of the Japanese army’s Seventh Regiment are mounted aboard dark green trucks that are easy to move and conceal, but for now, the soldiers are making no effort to hide them. Created a year ago, the fledgling regiment and its roving missile batteries occupy a hilltop base on the island of Okinawa that can be seen for miles.
The visibility is intentional. The Seventh is one of two new missile regiments that the army, called the Ground Self-Defense Force, has placed along the islands on Japan’s southwestern flank in response to an increasingly robust Chinese navy that frequently sails through waters near Japan.
“Our armaments are a show of force to deter an enemy from coming,” said Col. Yohei Ito, the regiment’s commander.
Since the regiment was created, U.S. Marines have begun visiting to observe its drills and study the Japanese-made Type-12 missiles, which can hit a ship more than 100 miles away. The Americans are eager to learn as they prepare to deploy their own land-based anti-ship missiles in Okinawa, part of a shift in strategy to challenge China’s growing forces.
“Japan has capabilities that the U.S. military didn’t have before now,” said Colonel Ito, the Japanese commander. “There are things that we can teach them.”
Given the growing military strength of nearby China and also North Korea, Japan wants to upgrade the defense alliance with the United States by becoming a fuller-fledged military partner and moving further from the pacifism enshrined in its Constitution adopted after World War II.
With the war in Ukraine stirring fears of a similar Chinese move on the democratic island of Taiwan, Japan announced in 2022 it would double spending on national security to about 2 percent of gross domestic product. The resulting defense buildup is now underway.
Japan is buying expensive weapon systems from the United States like the F-35B stealth fighter and Tomahawk cruise missiles that will give Japan the ability to strike targets on enemy soil for the first time since 1945.
The spending is also revitalizing Japan’s own defense industry. At a trade show last month near Tokyo, Japanese manufacturers displayed weapons currently under development, including a hypersonic missile, a laser system for shooting down drones, and a jet fighter to be built with Italy and Britain.
As China and North Korea tilt the power balance by building up their nuclear arsenals, Japanese policymakers are also asking the United States to show its commitment. There have been growing calls for Washington to make a visible deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the region to discourage potential foes from using theirs.
If Washington proves unreliable, Japan has an ultimate fallback: tons of plutonium stockpiled from its civilian nuclear power industry, which it could use to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. So far, the national trauma from the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has kept such an option off the table.