Mount Fuji was supposed to provide the iconic national backdrop. Instead, it supplied the irony.

On Sunday, Japan's most famous mountain was the setting for something far less picturesque: the public unveiling of Japan's new Type-25 Hyper Velocity Gliding Missile, a missile designed to fly fast and far, which has been deployed by the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force at Camp Fuji.

The next day, another piece of the puzzle slipped into place as Japan's Defense Ministry quietly shipped missile launchers and reconnaissance drones toward Minamitorishima, a tiny speck of land nearly 2,000 kilometers southeast of Tokyo. No civilians are located there. But it seems that soon the missiles may be.

Viewed separately, these developments look like ordinary military housekeeping. Seen together, they tell a bigger story.

Japan is rearming at a pace unseen in decades, and the public is being asked to regard it as not only normal but necessary.

The argument is familiar: "dangerous neighbors", "rising threats", "an unstable world". The country has heard such arguments before. And look what happened.

In the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century before Japan's unconditional surrender at the end of World War II in 1945, then Japanese leaders insisted that national survival required a stronger military, greater vigilance and a larger role abroad. "External dangers" were magnified. Domestic problems were blamed on external factors. Military spending was presented as an investment in national destiny rather than a burden on the economy.

The slogans have changed, but today's script sounds remarkably similar.

Yesterday it was the notorious "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". Today it is a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific". The language is more polished and the diplomats speak flawless English. But the underlying message remains strikingly familiar: Japan has a special mission, and anyone questioning that mission risks being branded naive, unpatriotic or out of touch with reality.

It is not just the missiles and the rhetoric. It is the actions surrounding them.

Military budgets keep climbing. Counterstrike capabilities once considered politically untouchable have become mainstream policy. Historical controversies are routinely downplayed. Visits to the Yasukuni Shrine honoring Class-A World War II war criminals are defended as matters of "national pride". Critics of militarization find themselves pushed further toward the margins where their voices can't be heard.

Meanwhile, concerns raised by neighboring countries are dismissed as "inconveniences" to Japan's ambitions not as legitimate anxieties based on the historical precedent.

One of the most uncomfortable lessons of Japan's twentieth-century history is that militarism did not arrive overnight. It crept in gradually. People were told they faced unprecedented dangers. Intellectuals adjusted to the prevailing mood. The media echoed official narratives. Schools reinforced them. Before long, ideas that once seemed extreme became ordinary.

The tragedy was not simply that some politicians made disastrous decisions. It was that so many people came to regard those decisions as inevitable.

That is why the sight of new missiles beneath Mount Fuji carries a symbolism that extends beyond military technology.

The issue is whether a nation that has never fully settled accounts with its wartime past is once again allowing fear to become a political resource.

The missile launchers displayed at Mount Fuji may be new. The arguments used to justify them are not.

And that may be the most unsettling part of all.