Japan is girding to match China's military muscle as Tokyo -- the seat of power in a nation that has sworn to renounce war forever -- recently approved a national military budget roughly equivalent to the size of Libya's gross domestic product (GDP).

The Japanese cabinet has assented to a record $42 billion budget for Japan's military forces in 2016. The amount represents a 2.8 percent increase over Tokyo's defense spending in the previous fiscal year, and marks four straight years of increased military expenditures for the pacifist country.

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The budget still requires the approval of the Japanese parliament; but with both houses dominated by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), legislative consent is largely a matter of formality.

Japan's newly-appointed defense minister, Gen Nakatani, says Tokyo's 2016 defense budget indicates the "changing situation" around the country.

"The level of defense spending reflects the amount necessary to protect Japan's air, sea and land, and guard the lives and property of our citizens," Nakatani told the BBC.

Simmering Dispute

Beijing and Tokyo are in the midst of a simmering dispute in the East China Sea over a small group of islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Daioyu in China.

The island group is under Japanese control, Tokyo having purchased three of the islands from their private owners in 2012.  They nevertheless remain at the center of a long-standing -- and often rancorous -- territorial dispute with China.

Nakatani has said that Chinese naval vessels have begun to appear more frequently in Japanese waters, and insists that jet fighters of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force have on occasion flown dangerously close to Japanese aircraft.

The Japanese defense minister's remarks have earned heated criticism from Beijing, which has asserted that its maritime activities in the East China Sea are "completely legitimate."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is preparing to deploy more forces and radar on the disputed islands, where it intends to establish an amphibious fighting force similar to the US Marine Corps to counter Chinese military presence in the area.       

The Japanese government likewise plans to use part of its new defense budget to acquire F-35 jet fighters, E-2D airborne early warning aircraft, 30 amphibious vehicles with tank guns, and an AEGIS destroyer.

Wrong Message

The increase in Japan's military spending follows the ratification in September of security laws that expand the country's capability to fight overseas alongside the US and other allies. 

The laws were widely criticized, but passed legislative scrutiny behind the urging of Abe, who heads the ruling LDP.

Japanese lawmaker Soichi Kondo of the Democratic Party of Japan, has expressed his opposition to the budget, which he says could send the wrong message to China, and provoke an arms race in the region.

"The Abe government has been inciting a sense of impending crisis," Kondo says. "The money would be better spent on social security and education."

Kondo's sentiment is shared by Professor Koichi Nakano of Tokyo's Sophia University, who laments the apparently fading appeal of pacifism among decison-makers in the Japanese government.  

"The government is trying to put an end to post-war pacifism as we know it," Nakano told the BBC in September, just as parliament approved the controversial security laws.  "And that is worrying, because nobody signed up to this idea of Japan becoming 'normal'."  

TagsChina-Japan relations, Diaoyu, China-Japan Dispute