Understanding Japan's Military Expansion

If you’ve been looking for a more substantial reason for the latest news coming from Japan, you’re thinking right.

The last month or so since the new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, took office, you’re hearing a lot of superficial symptoms of a larger issue.

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Hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi was voted in by parliament as Japan’s first female prime minister on Tuesday, emulating her hero, Britain’s late leader Margaret Thatcher, after a whirlwind few weeks of political wrangling.

She is a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead - including some executed war criminals - and is viewed by some Asian neighbours as a symbol of its past militarism.

She also favours revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution, and suggested this year that Japan could form a “quasi-security alliance” with Taiwan, the democratically governed island claimed by China.

That last bit got a lot of attention, but should it?

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