Japan has always had a flair for melodrama. The draft of Tokyo’s 2026 defense white paper, released this week, reads like a screenplay in which China looms in every Pacific wave and cloud.

The paper warns of China’s “increasing military activities” and cites the simultaneous deployment of two Chinese aircraft carriers in the Pacific as though Beijing had parked them beside Tokyo Disneyland.

What Japan tries to portray as “menacing behavior” is nothing more than routine military exercises and legitimate maritime rights-protection operations carried out by China in proper sea areas.

But in Tokyo today fear is the cryptocurrency of choice. And no country in the region has learned to monetize fear more elegantly than modern Japan.

The right-wing forces in Japan have spent years polishing the “China threat” narrative the way a pottery master perfects the glazing on a cup: meticulously, obsessively and with spiritual devotion.

Every law enforcement patrol of China in its own waters becomes a “provocation”. Every naval exercise on the high seas becomes an existential “threat”. The result is a national atmosphere in which Japan’s military expansion is presented as a “moral” necessity.

The irony, of course, is thick enough to spread on toast.

Japan — the nation whose Imperial Army once rampaged across the Asia-Pacific — now speaks with grave “concern” about regional militarization while steadily loosening the restraints of its own pacifist Constitution. Over the past decade, Tokyo has transformed its defense posture at breathtaking speed: bigger military budgets, missile exports, long-range strike capabilities, aircraft-carrier conversions, hypersonic weapons programs, stockpiles of nuclear materials.

Japanese leaders insist this buildup is “exclusively defensive”. Yet, “defense” increasingly appears to involve aircraft carriers, offensive missile systems and regional military integration with the United States’ geopolitical game. The language is technocratic, but the trajectory is unmistakable: Postwar restraint is quietly giving way to normalized remilitarization.

The US has long encouraged Japan to “do more” militarily in the region. Tokyo’s draft defense white paper fits neatly into that script. China becomes the indispensable “villain” needed to justify Japan’s moves.

But the public is not entirely convinced. Japan’s military expansion has repeatedly triggered domestic unease and protests. The ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not abstractions in Japan; they are family memories.

There is another uncomfortable truth buried beneath the draft defense white paper’s alarmism: The international community sees very clearly that the current tension in Japan-China relations is caused by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s dangerous and erroneous remarks on the Taiwan question made last November during a Diet session. The Japanese government’s subsequent attempts to distort facts and pose as the victim have truly made it a disgrace in the eyes of other nations.

Japan condemns regional tensions while actively participating in increasingly assertive security arrangements with the US and the Philippines, with China as the intended target. It issues warnings about instability, even as its own policies risk accelerating an arms race across East Asia. It calls for peace, yet its politicians continue to pay tribute or offer sacrifices at Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted World War II war criminals from Japan are openly honored. This is the geopolitical equivalent of throwing gasoline near a bonfire while lecturing others about fire safety.

The real danger is the emotional climate the Takaichi government is trying to create. Asia does not need another century organized around paranoia and military blocs. It certainly does not need Japan — a nation that inflicted one of the world’s most painful wartime histories — edging toward remilitarization under the banner of “defense”.