Japan has adopted a new five-year ocean policy that calls for stronger maritime security, including bolstering its coast guard’s capability and cooperation with the military amid China’s increasing assertiveness in regional seas.
The new Basic Plan on Ocean Policy adopted by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Cabinet also specifies that Japan must accelerate the development of autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated robots to bolster its surveillance capability.
The policy cited a list of threats; Chinese coast guard ships’ repeated intrusions into Japanese territorial waters, growing unauthorized maritime activity by “foreign survey boats” inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, increasing joint military exercises by China and Russia, and North Korea’s repeated missile launches.
Kishida averred at a policy meeting on Friday, April 28, 2023, that “The situation in the ocean around Japan is increasingly tense.” “It’s time for us to unite our wisdom among the industry, academia and government for ocean policy reform or ocean transformation,”Kishida iterated. He noted the need to better use maritime resources to achieve carbon neutrality.
The ocean plan also states that Japan needs to be more aggressive about undersea surveys and using undersea resources for energy, calling for greater use of the exclusive economic zone outside of territorial waters to build offshore wind-power generators.
Japan has repeatedly protested over Chinese research ships entering Japanese waters or the exclusive economic zone just outside it for apparent surveys of undersea deposits and other marine resources.
Japan’s Coast Guard Capability Needs Improvement
Additionally, the plan noted that the capability of Japan’s coast guard, which has been on the frontline of border disputes, needs to be improved.
The coast guard frequently confronts Chinese coast guard vessels approaching Japanese-controlled disputed islands in the East China Sea, North Korean poachers and suspected spy boats, and Russian coast guard vessels near disputed northern islands.
Japan’s coast guard is used for civilian policing at sea and not military combat, and the new plans calling for closer cooperation with the Self Defense Force have raised concerns about its role and safety in a possible conflict.
The new ocean policy is in line with Japan’s new national security strategy that Kishida’s government adopted in December in a major break from its self-defense-only principle that the country has maintained under the postwar pacifist constitution.
The new strategy highlights the need to bolster Japan’s military power with strike capability and double its defense budget within five years. The strategy also calls for closer cooperation between the military and the coast guard in any emergency over Taiwan or other possible conflicts.
With China, North Korea and Russia directly to its west and north, Japan “faces the severest and most complicated national security environment since the end of the war,” the strategy said, referring to World War II. It named China as “the biggest strategic challenge”; before North Korea and Russia, to Japan’s effort toward ensuring the peace, safety and stability for itself and the international society.
Possession of the strike-back capability is “indispensable” as deterrence to discourage enemy attacks, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a news conference last year, calling it “a major change to Japan’s postwar security policy.”
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