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Overview
Originally published in 1972.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691646718 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1372 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Forecast for Japan: Security in the 1970's
By James William Morley
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03091-3
CHAPTER 1
Economism and Balanced Defense
JAMES WILLIAM MORLEY
With the rise of Japan to the position of third-ranking economy in the world and the germination of a new nationalism in the land, there is a growing expectation in many quarters that Japan will soon want to "rearm" rather sharply and to reach out militarily for the defense of its expanding interests around the world, particularly in Asia.
There are those on the Right who look forward to such a course, hoping that Japan will contribute a new force for the containment of communism or at least "share" some of the "burdens" that the United States wishes to lay down. There are others on the Left who are apprehensive of such a course. The Chinese have been among the most extreme exponents of this view, Premier Chou En-lai reportedly arguing, for example, that under American prodding, Japan is planning greatly to expand its armed forces with the intent of either fighting America's battles in Asia or reviving its own imperial sphere. In between are a growing number of realistic commentators who feel unsure how far Japan will go, but do not believe, whether one approves or disapproves, that any state as wealthy, dynamic, and ambitious as Japan is today will long be content to bow its head. Is it not the common experience of mankind, they ask, for nations that acquire wealth to seek also power? Is it not likely, therefore, as the Japanese expand their economy at home and acquire ever greater interest in trade and investment abroad, that they will be less willing to rely on the United States for their ultimate security, more willing to build up their own armed forces, and more interest ed in deploying these forces, selling their arms and pursuing the alliance politics that characterize the behavior of all of Japan's great neighbors in Asia today? Is it not almost inevitable, to borrow the words of Herman Kahn, that Japan will become "nuclear power number 6?"
The significance of such premonitions can perhaps best be appreciated in comparative economic terms. Of course, one cannot equate levels of spending directly with military power, which must include geographical, political, psychological, and other assessments in addition to the composition of forces for which the money is spent. But defense budgets may serve as a very rough guide to capacity and intent. According to data available for 1967, the nations of the world fell into three categories of defense spending: the superpowers, including only the United States and the Soviet Union, which spent annually more than $50 billion each, far more than all the other countries put together; the major powers, including the People's Republic of China, France, West Germany, and Britain, which spent roughly $5-$7 billion each; and the minor powers, including all the rest, which spent less than $2 billion each.
Japan, of course, was in the minor power class, spending only slightly more than $1 billion (see Table 1); but in view of the size of its economy and the rapidity of its growth, all it would need to do to become a military superpower by 1975 would be for it to allocate about 10 percent of its GNP annually for military purposes. This can be demonstrated from the data presented in Tables 2 and 3. In 1968 Japan's GNP reached $141.9 billion. This was the result of a fairly constant and unprecedentedly high rate of growth augmented by inflation over many years — an average of 16.1 percent annually over the past decade. If the Japanese economy continues to grow at this rate, by 1975 the GNP will climb to more than $470 billion. If 10 percent of this were allocated to military purposes, these expenditures by 1975 could reach $47 billion annually, making Japan the third largest military spender in the world. Clearly, such appropriations could give Japan a nuclear-armed firepower perhaps five or more times greater than that of any other of the major powers, including mainland China, and within range of those of the USA and the USSR.
This is a shocking possibility, to be sure, but not on the face of it absurd if one considers the common experience of mankind that as nations grow richer, they generally grow prouder, acquire more international interests, and seek greater military power to defend them; and if one also remembers that the share of GNP which each of Japan's great neighbors is allocating for defense is roughly of this dimension: 7 percent for the People's Republic of China, 10 percent for the United States, and 14 percent for the USSR. The superpower option in today's world would appear, in fact, to be the option of conventional common sense.
To become a major military power by the mid-1970's would be, of course, far easier. It would require the allocation of only 2 percent of the GNP for this purpose. On the same assumption of continued GNP growth as before, a 2 percent allocation for defense in 1975 would yield $9.4 billion. This would compare very favorably with the $5-$7 billion annual expenditures of the other major military powers in recent years. (See Tables 2 to 5 for GNP growths.)
Small wonder, then, that for some time many observers have been expecting Japan to adopt one or another version of these accelerated rearmament policies. The paradox is that it has not done so. Instead, for more than a decade the annual share of GNP devoted to military purposes has been, not 10 percent nor even 2 percent, but an average of 0.9 percent, and even that share has been steadily declining (at the rate of 0.02 percent a year). In 1967 this amounted to $1.1 billion, only 1.5 percent of the U.S. allocation, 15 percent of that of mainland China, and less than those of such small countries as Czechoslovakia or Australia. Since 1967 Japan has been working to complete its Third Defense Build-up Plan. By the end of 1971 it was hoped to provide a Ground Self-Defense Force of approximately 180,000 uniformed personnel, organized into thirteen divisions and equipped with medium tanks, artillery, and Hawk surface-to-air missiles; a Maritime Self-Defense Force of approximately 142,000 tons, its largest units being destroyers, submarines, and anti-submarine aircraft; and an Air Self-Defense Force of approximately 880 aircraft, centering on F104J and F4 Phantom interceptors, NIKE-AJAX surface-to-air missiles, and the BADGE Automatic Radar (warning and control) system. This force, not yet fully achieved, has the limited capability of simply enabling Japan to hold its own home islands against an attack by conventional arms for a month or so while it waits for external support from the United States or the United Nations. It is not in any sense designed to play an independent role in the international balance of power and not even to protect Japan against advanced weaponry or a prolonged assault.
The relative modesty of this effort should not be taken to imply that the Japanese have felt no need at all to protect themselves against the dangers of an assault by a great power or a prolonged war. Obviously they have thought it better to meet these dangers by pursuing a conciliatory foreign policy and relying on the security treaty with the United States rather than to try to build the vast war machine necessary to confront the world alone. Nor does it mean that the Japanese have felt no need at all to shake their dependence on American military power or to strengthen their policy abroad with their own hands.
What it does mean is that the Japanese security policy has been based on a uniquely broad and economically centered conception that can best be described as one of balanced defense. As the conservatives who rule Japan see it, the security of a country depends not so much on forces in being — unless the threat is immediate — as on that country's total strength, viewed as a compound of the moral fiber of the people, the productivity of the economy, and the stability of the polity. It is to an overevaluation of the importance of forces in being and an underappreciation of the importance of total strength that they attribute the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war. They do not intend to make the same mistake again. Consequently, rather than rush headlong into a vast rearmament program, they have adopted a unique policy in which the allocations for security needs are kept commensurate not so much with the practices of their great neighbors as with a realistic estimate of the threats in Japan's security environment, the strength of Japan's other needs, and above all the requirements of its overall policy of economism which emphasizes economic growth.
The result has been a public fiscal formula to which they have adhered firmly for more than a decade. One element of the formula has been to emphasize the private sector by keeping the national budget small. For the past five years that budget has been held to an average of only about 12 percent of GNP, the average annual change being no more than plus or minus 0.6 percent (see Table 6). Another element has been to allocate the public moneys within the budget into eleven shares, each of which also has been held remarkably steady, gaining or losing over the five-year period from 1962 to 1967, for example, an average of no more than 1.74 percent of the total (see Table 7).
The share which varied the most, that for industrial development, changed only by 4.33 percent of the budget. If one adds up the total changes in shares each year among these purposes as given in Table 7, he finds that for the five-year period between 4.62 percent and 8.65 percent of the annual budget has been reallocated each year, the average being 6.24 percent. Assuming a budget stationary at 12 percent of GNP, this equals between 0.5 percent and 1.0 percent of GNP a year, with the average running about 0.7 percent.
After pensions and foreign obligations (including reparations), the share of the budget which has been held steadiest has been that for defense, its share of the annual budget changing on the average only about 0.33 percent and declining nearly every year from a high of 8.5 percent to a low of 7.7 percent of the total budget, or 1.01 percent and 0.90 percent of the GNP (see Table 1).
If Japan continues for the next five years pretty much as it has in the past five, there is no accelerated rearmament in prospect. The national budget may be expected to be held at about 12 percent of GNP, and the defense share can be expected to decline each year at the annual average rate of the past ten. This would mean for 1970 an allocation of 0.82 percent of the GNP or approximately $1.6 billion, declining presumably in regular annual stages to 0.72 percent of GNP in 1975, but increasing in that year in absolute terms concomitantly with the growth in GNP to $3.4 billion.
This may be a bit too precise. It could hardly be argued that a declining share is necessary to the policy of balanced defense. It is perhaps more reasonable to suppose that as military affairs assume greater importance, the Defense Agency will acquire a politically more powerful leadership and that, therefore, in the years ahead, the agency will be able to check the slippage and hold its share more or less constant, say roughly at the average level of the past decade, about 0.9 percent. Given our projections of the growth of GNP, this would yield something on the order of $4.2 billion in 1975, or a total over the period 1971-1975 of approximately $15.7 billion (see Table 8). Remarks of Yasuhiro Nakasone, when serving as director-general of the National Defense Agency, indicate that current government planning is indeed proceeding along these or very similar lines.
In military terms such spending could hardly put Japan in the major power class by 1975, but it would advance Japan halfway toward it in what might be called a middle-power range that it would occupy all by itself, perhaps ranking number seven in the world, spending about half as much as the mainland Chinese and about half as much as the rest of Asia combined.
There are then three alternatives for defense policy that Japan's burgeoning economy places before it in the first half of the 1970's: a superpower option, requiring a defense share of about 10 percent of GNP; a major power option, requiring a 2 percent share; and a middle-power option, requiring only the maintenance of its present less than 1 percent share. Which will it choose?
In subsequent chapters the strength of continuity and the possibilities for change will be analyzed in terms of the security concepts prevalent in Japan, the political leadership that can be expected, the business pressures that are likely, and the effects that shifts in the international environment may occasion. Here let us concentrate on the probable economic and bureaucratic determinants. Among these, the most important would appear to be the relationship of military expenditures to economic growth.
That stable, high growth remains the national imperative can hardly be doubted. It is deeply ingrained in the national consensus. A century ago when Japan threw off its feudal institutions and set out on the path of modernization, it determined on two objectives: wealth and military power, assuming that both could be attained simultaneously. One of the great lessons of World War II for most Japanese was that military power on such a scale was not needed and, in any event, could not be built unless and until the country had fully developed its economy. Economic growth is seen as the ground that makes all things possible. This lesson of history has been confirmed by the experience of the past two decades when peace has been maintained without large standing forces and the growth rate has steadily been accelerated, rising at constant prices from an annual average of 8.6 percent in 1951-1955 to 9.1 percent in 1955-1960 to 9.7 percent in 1960-1965 and 13.1 percent in 1965-1970.
Throughout the 1950's and 1960's Japanese officials and academic economists alike were constantly fearful that such a high rate of growth could not be sustained. They were, therefore, adamantly opposed to any increase in the share of the GNP allocated to defense since this was seen as a diversion of resources from productive uses and consequently a serious threat to the growth that they felt was so necessary, but so shaky. Premier Ikeda, in 1960, shocked the nation with the idea that the government could devise plans to bring about a doubling of the income within ten years. The fact is, income was quadrupled. By now high growth, unusual though it is among advanced industrial nations, is assumed by Japanese experts to be on a sound basis. Before the international monetary crisis of 1971, the Economic Planning Agency forecast an average annual real growth rate in the years ahead of 10.6 percent, the Long Term Credit Bank of Japan said 11.3 percent, and the Japan Economic Research Center, 12.4 percent. As a result of the monetary crisis, those rates were not achieved in fiscal 1971, but informed opinion expects rapid growth to be resumed in 1972. Our own estimate of 11.1 percent, therefore, seems not unreasonable.
These new conditions of economic confidence make it possible to examine more calmly than ever before the real relationship between the military share and the economic growth rate. The truth seems to be that, given the size and strength of the Japanese economy, within reasonable limits changes in the quantity of military spending may not produce wholly unacceptable effects on the growth rate. The analytical tool here is the gross incremental capital-output ratio, a figure that states the ratio between the gross domestic investment in a given year and the gross increment in GNP for the same year. As indicated in Tables 9 and 10, the ratio for Japan during the period 1971-1975 will probably run about 2.6. This means that for every yen invested or disinvested in any one year during the period, the GNP can be expected to rise or fall about 0.4 yen; or, in terms of percentages, that for every 1 percent of GNP added to or subtracted from the gross domestic investment, the GNP increment can be expected to rise or fall about 0.4 percent.
Now, to take the extreme case, let us suppose that all new money for an expanded defense share would be taken away from investment, whether public or private, and that, as is standard accounting procedure, none of the additional expenditures resulting could reasonably be considered investment — assumptions that are demonstrably false, but other assumptions would only strengthen our argument. We find then that the most serious effect that an increase in defense allocations could have on the economy would be a 0.4 percent decline in GNP growth for every 1 percent of GNP added to the annual defense expenditures. In short, a decision to become a major military power by 1975 by raising the defense share of GNP roughly one additional percent might be expected at most to depress the potential growth rate in that year by only 0.4 percent, that is, to lower it from 11.1 percent to 10.8 percent in real terms. And a decision to seek superpower spending status by that year — allocating, say, 10 percent of GNP or nine percent in addition to what is currently allocated — could be expected to depress the potential growth rate in that year by only 3.6 percent or to lower it in real terms from 11.1 percent to 8.6 percent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forecast for Japan: Security in the 1970's by James William Morley. Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Table of Contents, pg. v
- Introduction, pg. 1
- CHAPTER I: Economism and Balanced Defense, pg. 9
- CHAPTER II: Strategic Thought and the U.S.-Japan Alliance, pg. 35
- CHAPTER III: The Stability of Conservative Party Leadership, pg. 85
- CHAPTER IV: The Attitudes of the Business Community, pg. 111
- CHAPTER V: The Confrontation with Realpolitik, pg. 135
- CHAPTER VI: The Involvement in Southeast Asia, pg. 169
- CHAPTER VII: A Forecast with Recommendations, pg. 204
- Contributors, pg. 239
- Index, pg. 241