Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi questioned the accuracy of China’s official military spending figures in a fresh sign that Tokyo is taking a tougher line in response to Beijing’s claims that its regional rival is pursuing “new militarism.”
Drawing a contrast with China, Koizumi said that Japan would take a transparent approach to investing in new methods of warfare like drones and artificial intelligence that are needed to keep up with the changing nature of conflict.
“Our budgets undergo scrutiny and deliberation in parliament,” Koizumi said in an interview Wednesday. “Are the figures they put forward genuinely grounded in fact, backed by evidence, and highly transparent? When doubts arise on those points, how much effort do they put into explaining them?”
Academics and Western governments generally doubt that China’s headline defense spending figures capture its total outlays. That means the numbers don’t provide an apples-to-apples comparison with data disclosed by other nations.
In December, the Pentagon said it assessed China’s total defense spending for 2024 was 32% to 63% higher than Beijing’s announced budget of $231 billion.
The Pentagon estimate includes spending on China’s armed police, provincial security spending, veterans’ affairs, mobilization activities, defense-related research and development, and military capital spending.
Beijing has repeatedly pushed back against claims that its military spending is not transparent. China’s foreign and defense ministries didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Koizumi’s remarks suggest Tokyo is stepping up its public criticism of China as Beijing maintains its pressure campaign against Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. China continues to demand that Takaichi retract remarks she made last year suggesting Japan could get involved in a conflict over Taiwan.
Among other measures, China has tightened controls on exports to Japan such as rare earths that have both commercial and military use, leveraging a key chokehold it has used against the U.S. and other nations. China is by far the largest producer and refiner of rare earths, which have growing importance for the tech, defense and automotive sectors.
At the Group of Seven (G7) summit in France on Tuesday, Takaichi “expressed her grave concern that China’s measures against Japan could adversely affect the supply chains of the G7 and other like-minded countries,” according to a statement from Japan’s Foreign Ministry. Like Koizumi, Takaichi also directly named China, going beyond the usual diplomatic tactic of not specifying the nation in question.
The defense minister has already responded sharply to the claim of Japanese new militarism from Beijing.
“There is a country that has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and strategic bombers,” Koizumi said in a speech in Singapore in May. “Japan has neither of such weapons, and yet Japan is labeled new militarism. Isn’t it strange?”
In March, China said its defense spending would grow by 7% this year to 1.91 trillion yuan ($283 billion), a slightly slower pace of spending than in recent years as Beijing set its lowest annual economic growth target in more than three decades.
Japan’s forecast for its own military and defense-related spending for the current fiscal year is around ¥10.6 trillion ($66.1 billion), less than one-quarter of China’s official defense spending figure.
In 2022, Tokyo broke with a long-standing informal cap on defense spending of 1% of gross domestic product, and said it would target outlays worth 2% of GDP by 2027.
Current spending is slightly below that level when compared against 2022 GDP and more than ¥2 trillion behind compared with 2025 GDP. Japan is also under pressure from the U.S. to raise spending further to 3.5% of GDP, in line with Washington’s demands for its other allies.
Koizumi declined to commit Japan to that level, insisting that the priority was to first determine where money should be spent, including measures to improve conditions for those who join the military. Recruitment is a persistent problem for Japan’s military as the population continues to decline.
“I want to purely request what is truly needed first, rather than focusing on percentages or baseline numbers,” Koizumi said.
So far, Beijing has gained little traction with its claim that Japan is reverting to its period of domination of other Asian nations. “The malevolent emergence of neo-militarism in Japan is putting regional peace and stability under threat,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said recently.
Still, after a meeting on Saturday in Ulaanbaatar, China’s top diplomat and his Mongolian counterpart issued a joint communique that said their nations “oppose all forms of fascism and militarism” in an apparent swipe at Japan.
Despite his criticism of China’s defense spending, Koizumi said Japan is open to talks with Beijing, a stance that Takaichi has also reiterated.
“What is vital in accountability and transparency is to never neglect dialogue, regardless of differences or conflicting stances,” Koizumi said. “Therefore, Japan seeks dialogue no matter how much our position diverges from China’s.”
