Re: Japanese Return to Militarism!
Eventually things have to change. Germany has moved on yes but she hardly bent over backwards even today their are still ghosts of the dark days of Nazi Germany. Still deep rooted seeds of antisemetic hate. For example the Uganda club who wants to force the relocation of the Jewish peoples to the Uganda. For you normalised relations may not seem right but after seventy years if not now when?
As for expeditionary vs finance the JSDF budget for 2012 was 55.9 billion or 1% of GDP the french 58.9 or 2.5%of GDP
If you think what Germany has done is not bending backwards, I wonder how you would characterise what the Japanese have done to try and redeem themselves in the eyes of their victims.
You have to dig up extreme fringe groups like the Uganda club, which frankly, has a minuscule following and I would be surprised if many people have even heard of them.
Japanese government ministers and officials and even Prime Ministors have visited shrines dedicated to the very worst war criminals in recent human history, denied Japan's wartime attrocities and only offered a grudging and conditional apology in 1992 and still holds territory seized through wartime aggression.
Can anyone even imagine any German politician going to pay their respects to the tombs of Hitler, Gerbals and the rest, denied the holocaust happened and threatened to use force to defined territory nazi Germany seized through wars of aggression?
The passage of time does not absolve the guilty, only true contrition and remorse will. If Japan is hoping that China or South Korea would simply forget about the horrors it inflicted on them, then Japan is delusional.
Japan might formalise their existing military force and even expand it, but doing so will only make its neighbours spend more themselves on defence to counter the new Japanese military and deepen the already significant mistrust and even resentment its neighbours feel towards Japan, because Japan has not even come close to earning the right to be forgiven and accepted as a normal member of the international community in the eyes of anyone other than the Americans.
Thus, far from adding stability as the Americans no doubt hope, Japanese rearmament will only serve to heighten tensions and further destabilise the region and make conflict more, not less, likely. And with the way Japanese leaders and ultranationalists have been clowning around keeping old resentments fresh over the decades, if conflict breaks out, it would be all but impossible to put an end to it, because if Japan starts another war with China, there is no way China would leave the job half done again as America did during the closing stages of WWII.
Unlike nazi Germany, imperialist Japan was never fully cleansed of the fascists and nazis, many of whom not only escaped punishment, but also managed to remain in positions of power and authority to pass on their sick ideology which shaped the minds of many Japanese in power today. Unless these degenerates are thoroughly purged once and for all and future Japanese gerenations taught in no uncertain terms the errors of their past ways and the horrors that was done in their name, Japan will always be a danger and threat to its neighbours and the world at large. Because unlike Germany, many Japanese are not really sorry about what Japan did in WWII, they are only sorry they lost, and are always looking to try and regain the 'past glory' of imperialist Japan using any means necessary, including military aggression, to do so.
