So Japan wants to suffer the same fate it has inflicted on China almost a century ago. I wonder if they realize what they are about to get themselves into. With an economy like Japan right now, any kind of economic defense activity of this kind on a mass scale could put their economy on suicide watch and given that the USA is having trouble arming Ukraine right now, trying to arm Japan on top of that is simply overkill for all parties involved. China in the end will bring down Japan by doing nothing. That is if GT is telling the truth but then again, they did make wrong calls before and Japan seems to be more interested in food channels/anime nowadays rather then the real world so any cause for a war on Japans part is probably a childish smoke screen like Abe seems to resort to all the time to gas light the Japanese into thinking the economy is doing well when it isnt
Japan is weird in the fact that while the leadership are all fascists from the ww2 era, the population is, if polls can be believed, one of the least likely to follow fascist values.
In fact the only reason Japan still has a regime like that can be attributed to the one party state set up by the American government in collaboration with infamous war criminal Nobusuke Kishi.
War on China means total mobilisation and conscription. During peacetime, there is no resistence to the LDP party state because the LDP asks nothing of Japanese except occasional words of support and to keep their heads down.
Can LDP really ask for average Japanese to mobilize en masse, risk their homes and families?
If the fascist council knows that it's unlikely the Japanese people can fight, then it also makes sense to undertake militarization just to show their occupier that "we're doing something". And if US wants to launch any special operations, Japan could simply say that they are not prepared and by then, if they have a stronger army, it gives more leverage for US to actually listen to them.
