Japan's expanding military budget deserves more public and political scrutiny, as the country pushes defense spending higher year after year without sufficient deliberation in the National Diet, warned a Japanese scholar on Wednesday.
A record initial state budget for fiscal 2026 was approved by Japan's lower house on Friday evening with the backing of the ruling coalition's supermajority, amid criticism that the bill was pressed ahead despite controversies surrounding its contents and unusually shortened deliberations.
The total size of the draft budget exceeds 122.31 trillion yen (about 769 billion U.S. dollars), marking a record high, with the defense budget also setting a new record of over 9 trillion yen for the first time. The proposal has sparked ongoing debate in Japan since the government unveiled the draft late last year.
Teruhisa Horio, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and long-time scholar of pedagogy, said that the ballooning military budget violates Japan's Constitution.
Japan's Constitution, which took effect in 1947, is often referred to as the pacifist Constitution because Article 9 states that the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.
"Japan clearly has a Peace Constitution that stipulates it will not wage war and shall not possess war-making capabilities. Why, then, has the Japanese government increased defense spending to such a level, while the education budget has not been increased? Is this not rather strange? Japan's defense budget is truly staggering, and Japan has also purchased all sorts of equipment. So where exactly will Japan deploy its missiles, and where are they intended to be aimed? It's not just in important areas like Kyushu and Okinawa; Kumamoto is also seeing increased military deployments. My friends are currently there participating in activities opposing this military expansion," he said.
According to the professor, the issue of military spending should be brought for discussion in the Japanese legislature.
"The so-called 'right to collective self-defense' should never have been recognized in the first place—that is the true spirit of Japan's Constitution. Isn't it absurd to even suggest that this 'right to collective self-defense' could justify preemptive attacks? The same goes for the budget issue—why isn't there a discussion about 'excessive military spending'? This is precisely the kind of issue that should be debated more broadly within Japan's National Diet," said the professor.
Japan's military expansion worthy of scrutiny: scholar
