愚かな指導者と文明の崩壊Foolish Leaders and the Collapse of Civilization

It is a constant of history that civilizations crumble from below when foolish leaders seize the reins of governance. But at a stage where globalization has already been accomplished, the fact that this collapse is occurring on a planetary scale may be without precedent.

This week, on the island of Yonaguni where construction of a Self-Defense Forces base has been under way for some time, a plan was announced to deploy surface-to-air missiles and a missile unit by March 2031. This was not a sudden announcement. It has been anticipated ever since the Yonaguni garrison, a Ground Self-Defense Force base, was established ten years ago. Yonaguni is the island closest not to mainland Okinawa or the Japanese mainland but to Taiwan. In response to recent Chinese movements, the Japanese side has been advancing the conversion of the island into a frontline military outpost at the behest of the United States. In other words, should a war over Taiwan occur, the frontline military position for Japan and US forces stationed in Japan will be Yonaguni.

Approximately 160 personnel, centered on a coastal surveillance unit, are currently said to be stationed on Yonaguni. Is this one of the omens of Japan abandoning peace once more and entering into war?

The weakening of American power, which has led the world for roughly the past thirty years, has sent shockwaves across the globe. Every advanced nation is consumed with the task of simply maintaining itself and has no capacity to look beyond its own borders. As if threading the needle of this gap in Western oversight, Japan's militarization is being pursued with quiet determination. It is difficult not to read this as a portent of a troubled future. Seen from another angle, however, Japan's rearmament signifies the disintegration of the regime built by the victors of the Second World War. It can equally be read as proof that the pressure once exerted on the world by those victors has fallen into dysfunction.

Japan will most likely rearm in the near future. Conscription will be reinstated. Nuclear armament on a rental basis from the United States will become a reality. In a sense it seems as though we passed the turning point long ago.

What demands attention regarding this week's announcement of missile deployment on Yonaguni is that it was made by the current Minister of Defense, Shinjiro Koizumi. The son of Junichiro Koizumi, who took office as the 87th Prime Minister in April 2001 and built a long-lasting administration of 1,980 days, Shinjiro Koizumi has long occupied a position in which the prime ministership has been promised to him. It should be noted that the entity directing Japan's defense budget is not the Japanese government. It is the American think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies).

Let me say in advance that this is not an American problem. The reason lies in the fact that the Liberal Democratic Party, rather than the Japanese government as such, has never possessed a national strategy of its own and has made perpetual obedience to the United States its de facto national strategy. In practice, Michael Green, the advisor on Japanese security policy who holds the Japan-side leverage at CSIS, has stated openly that since Japan has no national strategy and its strategy is simply to follow the United States at all times, it makes no difference which LDP member becomes prime minister (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_i473eu1ow).

In short, the Japanese government possesses no national vision of its own whatsoever. Its sole guarantee of regime survival is unwavering subservience to the United States. The weak yen policy and other developments on the Japanese side are therefore better understood as driven by American intent. Postwar Japan, at least as far as the LDP is concerned, amounts to little more than an entity administering an American dependency. This is why, even as Europe demonstrates a willingness to distance itself from the United States, Japan's dependence has only deepened.

The fact that it is CSIS rather than the Japanese government that determines the allocation of defense spending will remain important going forward, because the backing behind the current Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi is CSIS itself. Shinjiro Koizumi has in fact frequently stated in public that he is a CSIS fellow and has appeared on the CSIS stage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6KcrPgnNOw).

The risk of a Taiwan contingency began to be promoted by Japanese mass media around 2018. Behind this sudden campaign lay a single report. It is known as the Armitage Report. The lead author was Richard Armitage, a former US Deputy Secretary of State, who died in April 2025. This figure was in effect the proxy of the military-industrial complex that had been pressing Japan toward rearmament throughout the 2000s. As if to symbolize this role, in 2015 the Japanese side awarded Armitage the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, the highest class of decoration. The stated reason was his contribution to strengthening and fostering friendly US-Japan relations. The reality was that he was the foremost figure driving Japan's remilitarization.

The first Armitage Report was delivered to the Japanese government in 2000, but it was the fourth report in 2018 that became the problem. It contained the China threat thesis and the North Korea threat thesis, and its contents were disseminated through the Japanese mass media.

In other words, the entity that has been stoking the Taiwan contingency is not the US government. CSIS published the results of a tabletop exercise simulating a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan in January 2023. The year assumed in that scenario was 2026. In a sense, what is becoming reality today as the Taiwan contingency is the product of years of agitation by the US military-industrial complex operating through CSIS, senior officials at Yokota Air Base who continue to hold effective control over the Japanese side, and the Japanese LDP politicians, bureaucrats, and mass media who faithfully follow their directives.

These are people who wish to plunge East Asia into a state of war for the sake of their own regime maintenance and profit, just as they have done in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. That the figure being elevated to serve their agenda in this engineered Taiwan contingency is the current Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi must not be overlooked. The meaning of "must not be overlooked" will become clear in Japan's near future. He is the figure who acts most faithfully on their directives. His ascent to the prime ministership, given his brazen public declarations of his CSIS ties, can be read as the signal that war in East Asia will begin without anyone holding a vision of it.

As if in response to these Japanese movements, one month earlier on January 24 China entered an extraordinary situation in which President Xi Jinping purged the two figures directly below him in the military hierarchy, Zhang Youxia, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and Liu Zhenli, Chief of the Joint Staff Department.

In connection with these developments on the Chinese side across the sea, the LDP's historic landslide of 316 seats in the House of Representatives election counted on February 8 suggests that their intentions will be reflected in Japan's national policy more strongly than ever before. Above all, as if to symbolize the LDP's unchecked trajectory, the pace of activity aimed at realizing their agenda has intensified since the electoral victory.

Plans are already under way to deploy domestically produced long-range missiles with counterattack capability at a base in Kumamoto by the end of March. The Ministry of Defense under Shinjiro Koizumi has offered no explanation whatsoever to local residents. The deployment is being forced through in complete disregard of the public voice.

While the world's attention is blinded by high-impact events elsewhere, Japan has quietly begun walking the path to war. Centuries from now its history will record that this harrowing near-future was brought into being by domestic rulers drowning in self-interest who possessed no national vision of their own, and by a dynamic that continued to lean on the privileges of the victors' structure, parasitizing vested interests while performing the role of hegemon.