Open arms

IN ANOTHER sign that Japan is slipping its pacifist moorings, the country this week played host to its first international defence fair—on maritime security. Fittingly the three-day Maritime Systems and Technologies (MAST) conference on Asian defence, which is run by a private British security firm, took place in Yokohama, a port city near Tokyo that was one of the first to open to Western trade.

In parallel, on May 13th the government of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, approved security bills that will allow Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (SDF), pictured, to roam farther afield, to come to the aid of allies (if Japan too is under threat) and to provide them with backup and supplies in the event of a conflict. The bills, which are expected to pass the Diet, Japan’s parliament, this summer, are part of a strategy that Mr Abe calls “pro-active pacifism”: sharing more of Asia’s defence burdens with America.

The driving force behind these changes is China’s growing military clout in the region. In his opening remarks at the fair Satoshi Morimoto, a former Japanese defence minister, implied as much: “Maritime security and freedom of navigation based on international rule of law are crucial for this region.” This week America considered sending planes and warships to the South China Sea, near the disputed Spratly Islands where China is building huge artificial islands, and what appears to be a military airstrip. China has said it is “deeply concerned” by reports of possible American patrols.

Mr Abe has reversed the more conciliatory line that his predecessors took towards China. This year his government passed a defence budget that broke post-war records for its size. The SDF are already forming an amphibious assault force to retake remote islands in the event of an invasion in Japan’s south-west—near the site of a territorial dispute with China. The force is partly modelled on Britain’s Royal Marines, who are also advising the SDF on military strategy against the Chinese.

Delegates to the arms conference mostly welcomed Japan’s changing policies, including a decision last year to lift a ban on defence exports. Hirohiko Sakurai, a director of a small firm that makes amphibious vehicles, says that he plans to sell more to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The bigger Japanese defence contractors are cagey about exporting weapons; some are concerned that they will suffer from the tag of “merchants of death”.

After 70 years of supplying hardware to a single customer—the SDF—most have no experience of the global military market and little hope of competing with the battle-tested equipment of America and Russia. But Brigadier Richard Spencer, an assistant chief of staff for the Royal Marines who is now in Japan to advise the SDF, says Japan’s military contractors make sophisticated submarines and amphibious aircraft. In a sea change for Japan, the country could soon be selling them to the rest of the world.