By 
SINGAPORE — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said
Friday that his country was ready to take a stronger role in collective
defense in the Asia-Pacific area and beyond, and made clear that he
views China as the most immediate threat to regional stability.
“Japan intends to play an even greater and more proactive role than it
has until now in making peace in Asia and the world something more
certain,” Abe told a gathering of East Asian defense ministers and
officials, including U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, gathered here
for the annual Shangri-La Dialogue on regional security.
Abe’s muscular remarks echoed a nationally televised address he made in Japan this
month calling for a reinterpretation of Japan’s post-World War II
constitution to expand the role of its military to aid allies and in
U.N. peacekeeping operations. The use of Japan’s military for anything
other than self-defense has been banned since the aftermath of the war,
and Abe’s proposed change is controversial there.
He said that Japan’s “new banner” would be used to help “ensure the
security of the seas and the skies, and thoroughly maintain freedom of
navigation and freedom of overflight,” a direct challenge to China’s
increasingly confrontational actions in disputed waters of the South
China Sea and East China Sea.
In recent weeks, China has flown military jets near the
Japanese-administered Senkaku islands it claims in the East China Sea
and has charged that Japanese fighters have entered a disputed air zone
between the two countries.
China is also in disputes with its neighbors farther south, including
Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, over nearly all of the South
China Sea, with its busy international shipping lanes and rich oil and
gas resources. Nearly all those governments have had direct clashes with
Beijing; the Philippines has asked the International Court of Justice
in The Hague to intervene, and anti-China riots broke out this month in Vietnam after China positioned an oil rig in waters claimed by both countries.
The territorial and maritime disputes have stymied U.S. efforts to
protect its own economic and defense interests in the region and to act
as an honest broker, even as the Obama administration has called on
China to respect international law and other accords it has signed with
other Asian countries.
“The least-desirable state of affairs is having to fear that coercion
and threats will take the place of rules and laws, and that unexpected
situations will arise at arbitrary times and places,” Abe said. “We do
not welcome” conflict between “fighter aircraft and vessels at sea. What
we should exchange are words.”
Although many in the region view Abe as uncomfortably hawkish, he was
clearly playing to a sympathetic audience of Asia-Pacific states in an
increasingly volatile region that fears what it sees as growing Chinese
power and North Korean aggression as rapidly growing threats.
China has sent a second-tier military delegation to the conference, and
Abe’s only applause line of the night came after his response to a
Chinese officer who noted Abe’s controversial visit late last year to a
shrine honoring Japanese war dead and asked if he had similar good
wishes for the souls of the “millions and millions of people in China,
Korea and many countries in this region that have been killed by the
Japanese Army.”
Abe responded that he had expressed remorse for World War II many times
and, in a direct dig at China’s communist government, said Japan had
subsequently “created a peaceful, free and democratic nation based on
that reflection. We protect human rights and respect the law.”
Asked whether Japan was willing to submit its maritime disputes with
China to independent third-party arbitration called for in international
law, he said “that is what China should think about. . . . China is the
one challenging the status quo.”
“There is no territorial dispute,” Abe said. “Japan effectively controls the islands.”
