The business community must also step forward. Industrial revival and deterrence are no longer separate projects but one and the same.
Semiconductors, robotics, AI and precision manufacturing are inherently dual-use and Japan’s corporate sector must lead the shift with urgency, in partnership with government, by dismantling institutional barriers – including the self-imposed university ban on defence research and regulatory silos that restrict labour mobility. Eighty years after the war’s end – we cannot survive with an education system still shaped by postwar assumptions rather than the world as it is.
Finally, the country requires a recovery of national confidence, having grown accustomed to managing decline rather than pursuing renewal. Deterrence does not start with missiles or budget lines. It starts with a society that believes in its own future. A nation that has lost that belief will struggle to defend itself. This is the hardest truth in the entire debate, and the one most rarely spoken aloud.
We must also build a broader economic and security coalition. While America remains indispensable, Japan’s vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific offers like-minded nations – India, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea and others – a common purpose and a foundation for regional prosperity through factors such as integrated supply chains. A coalition cannot guarantee peace, but it raises the price of aggression beyond what most are willing to pay.
There is one thing Japan must never surrender: the trust earned across eight decades as a peaceful nation. Japan can acquire real deterrence and remain, at its core, the peaceful country it chose to become in 1945. That peace was never free. The past generation paid with restraint; this generation must pay for the next eighty years with clarity and will – and accept that no one else will bear the cost.
