Toothless tiger: Japan Self-Defence Forces
Asia military analyst Franz Stefan Gady asks just how fighting fit are Japan's so-called Self-Defence Forces?
Japan's relationship with its armed forces was once a defining characteristic of the nation.
Indeed, "Fukoku kyohei [Enrich the state, strengthen the military]" was the battle cry of the reformers who founded modern Japan during the so-called Meiji Restoration beginning in the 1860s.
In the first decades of the 20th Century, Japan, rather than a state with a military, the island nation slowly transformed into a military with a state - "one hundred million hearts beating as one",
as a wartime propaganda slogan boasted.
That all changed after the World War Two.
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