The Growing Defense Force

No nation in Asia has more need for military defenses and more trouble building them than Japan. Face to face with Communist China, it is hamstrung by a U.S. -imposed constitution that is the first in the world to "renounce war as a sovereign right and the threat or use of force as means of settling inter national disputes." It is also the home land of as vigorous and noisy a group of antimilitarists as exists anywhere in the world. Still, very silently, Japan be gan to build a "national police reserve" in 1950, which with American aid has grown quietly but quickly into a compact and highly competent organization now known as the Self Defense Forces.

Last week 11,400 Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen went out on maneuvers near Osaka, swarming over the bleak dunes of Gobo beach in a meticulously timed amphibious landing that would have done credit to U.S. marines.

Nobody shouted "banzai" and not a single eye blazed with a desire to die for the Emperor. The most warlike cries came from local Communists demonstrating against the maneuvers.

Skirmish-Line Flowers. Altogether, Japan's tight little military machine in cludes an army of 171,500 men in 13 divisions, with 870 tanks, 3,700 artil lery pieces ranging from mortars to 155-mm. howitzers, 110 helicopters, two batteries of high-reaching Hawk antiaircraft missiles and one of obsoles cent Nike-Ajax missiles. The air force, with 39,553 men, flies all-weather inter ceptors and maintains a tight controland-warning system that covers the four major Japanese islands. The navy--once the pride of Japan--has only 55 destroyers and frigates, seven subs and a handful of minesweepers and torpedo boats. But its 34,963 men are still the cream of a seagoing crop, and recently Japan began building its own destroyers --rakish, clipper-bowed vessels armed with American Tartar and Asroc missiles that combine the sleekness of Japanese naval design with the accuracy of U.S. weapons systems.

Japan's military men have played it very cozily indeed. For many years few dared to wear their uniforms off base. Even when they pitch in for disaster-relief duty--as they did during last year's typhoon season and in earthquakes and floods before that--they are often sneered at and derided. The old samurai tradition of Japanese militarism has been purged--or has at least gone underground. No longer do army recruits sing the old gunka (war songs) that praise "cherry blossoms the color of shrimp" and demand that a soldier "die as the flowers of the skirmish line." A sanitized marching song now proclaims: "Even the smallest tree under the blue sky/Has the freedom to grow."

Swords of Bamboo. But Japanese soldiers still practice kendo--the art of swordsmanship--even though no swords are permitted in military services. They use traditional bamboo staves. And a division recruited near Sendai has been lectured by its officers about its predecessor: the tough Imperial 2nd Division that killed 2,200 in the battle for Guadalcanal's Henderson Field. Fully 14% of the officer corps are veterans of the Pacific war, including Army Chief of Staff Yoshifusa Amano, 55, who served the Imperial army in China, Indochina and the Northern Pacific. "Fortunately, the climate toward the forces is getting better," said Amano last week. "People are just now beginning to get over the hangover from the war's defeat."

That's the hope as well of Self Defense Forces Director Raizo Matsuno, 48, a lean, grey-haired ex-naval officer and protege of Premier Eisaku Sato. As the man charged with Japan's immediate security decisions, Matsuno would like to upgrade Japanese defense spending from 1.3% of the gross national product to 2% (the U.S. spends nearly 9% of its G.N.P. on defense). That would amount to $1.1 billion and greatly increase both the materiel and the mobility of the armed forces. Matsuno's bill is currently before the Diet, and it has Premier Sato's wholehearted backing. "The policy of Communist China denies peaceful coexistence," Sato said recently in rebuttal to defense critics. "It is a threat enough without being armed with nuclear weapons. With them, China's threat to Japanese security is real."

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