ON JAPAN'S FRONT LINES

Dispatches from Asia's new Cold War

- Yoshiaki Nohara

As the sun rose over Tanegashima, a small island off the southern tip of mainland Japan, a group of amphibious vehicles emerged from the stern of the Kunisaki, a flat-topped assault ship operated by the country’s Self-Defense Forces. The vehicles—essentially floating armored personnel carriers painted in green and brown camouflage, designed to bring an infantry squad ashore under fire—roared through the surf, firing smoke rounds to obscure their positions. Once they hit the beach, which had been fortified with barbed wire and iron posts, teams of soldiers sprinted out the rear doors and fanned out into combat formations. Two hovercraft followed behind; in a real battle they’d carry additional troops and armored assets, but for the day’s exercise they were mostly empty. From higher ground more soldiers watched the landings closely, assessing their comrades’ performance in seizing the coastline from an imaginary occupier.

After the drills concluded, Tatsuya Fukuda, a mine warfare commander, briefed a group of journalists who’d been invited to watch. “The importance of this kind of training is obvious if you look at the security environment around our nation,” he said. “It’s unpredictable what will happen when or how. We need to have the power of deterrence to prevent any contingency.” Fukuda didn’t name any specific threats to Japan, but everyone knew what he was talking about. Tanegashima is closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo, in waters that would likely be a key theater in a military engagement between the US and China. Should a war come—an unlikely but increasingly plausible scenario, especially if the battle for Ukraine ignites a new era of global conflict—it might be on the front line.