[By Zhai Haijun/China.org.cn]

The Japanese government’s recent approval of the new “principles and guidelines on the transfer of defense equipment” has triggered media uproar calling the move an abandonment of the Three Principles on Arms Export, which was set in 1967, but later evolved into an actual ban of weaponry exports, hence a desertion of the pacific road the country had followed after the end of the World War II. However, the old Three Principles had long become something for show only. Now, it is only too natural for the ornament to be replaced, which, as Shinzo Abe argues, has become “out of fashion”.

Americans should not feel surprised at the change, for it was none other than the United States that encouraged Japan to break the commandment 30 years ago. At that time, the Reagan administration wanted Tokyo to assume more security responsibility, thus the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was authorized to carry out patrols in waters 1,000 nautical miles off the coast. As a result, the number of P-3Cs maritime patrolling aircraft licensed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Lockheed Martin increased dramatically in Japan’s armed forces. Ronald Reagan also persuaded the former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone to exclude the U.S. from the prohibited destinations of export of Japanese defense technologies. From then on, Japanese military technologies kept flowing into the U.S., such as SAM portable air defense missile, naval shipbuilding, radar equipment in the FS-X fighter cooperative production project and the digital-controlled flight technology for the improved model of P-3C. In 1985, Nakasone also took part in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or the so-called “Star War Plan.”

Arms trade between Japan and the U.S. has never ceased over the past 30 years. In 2004, Japan’s arms export to the U.S. made a landmark breakthrough promoted by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. In December that year, the Japanese government officially joined the Ballistic Missile Defense project initiated by the U.S. Though Americans undertook the designing of the weaponry systems and the project’s core technologies, such as dynamic warheads and radar systems, Japanese technologies were also widely adopted in the project. Japan’s arms manufacturers won large chunks of orders and the weaponry parts developed by them were transferred to their American partners unrestrictedly. To dodge restriction by the policies, the Koizumi administration announced that the BMD project was not within the ban of arms export.

In other areas, such as Southeast Asia, exports of Japanese weapons also evaded the Three Principles. Of course this was done with a necessary trick. That is, call a spade non-spade, or a weapon non-weapon, as Koizumi did. Japan is undoubtedly the most adroit in playing such an Orwellian newspeak-style gimmick, just as it did with its army. It calls its fifth world-ranked armed forces not an army, but a Self-Defense Force.