North Korea's nuclear ambitions and its staging of missile test flights over Japanese territory would worry anybody, and China's costly re-armament program has the entire region nervous. But Tokyo is worried by its own boldness in saying so, and even more worried about its highly important strategic decision to deepen its close security links with the United States into something that looks very like a formal alliance.

Japan's Defense Agency Director, Gen. Yoshinori Ono, won the internal political battle in Tokyo to put his concern about China on the record, and cited the recent case where a Chinese submarine intruded into Japanese waters when demanding that Japan pay attention to China's new naval capabilities.

The bulk of Japan's foreign ministry and half the Koizumi government were against naming China, but the Bush administration was delighted that Japan is increasingly ready to admit that it has now grown out of the 50 years of self-abnegation and official pacifism and it now a serious U.S. military ally.

If the presence of Japanese troops in Iraq and the logistics support for the U.S. operations in Afghanistan were not clear enough symbols of Japan's new stance, the new defense policy also eases Japan's arms export controls to enable the sales of missile defense components to the United States. The new strategy, revised to take account of such new security dangers as terrorism, emphasizes Japan's determination to strengthen its alliance with Washington, saying Japan will be proactive in bilateral strategic dialogue on security issues.

Japan's top officials seemed stunned by their own boldness in finally daring to call a spade a spade. It's not that Japan sees China as a threat, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference immediately after the Cabinet approved the new Defense Program. And Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said it was not wholly correct to say China is a threat because the Program only wrote that there is need to watch out for China's increase in military spending.

Well, yes. Japan's new program does not come right out and say that China's re-armament is aimed at deterring the U.S. Navy's aircraft carriers from coming anywhere near the Taiwan Straits, and thus strategically aimed at slowly but surely excluding the Americans from the Asian security equation. But why else would China be buying silent new submarines that can lie in wait for the carriers, or buying the long-rang ship killing missiles and the Su-30 fighter-bombers to deliver them?

The government of Junichiro Koizumi has now made a fateful decision, that Japan's future would not be secure in an Asia dominated by China as a regional superpower, and unrestrained by a U.S. military presence as a balancing power.

This is important. Japan's defense budget is nearly $50 billion a year, close to that of Britain or France, widely reckoned to be the two most serious military powers after the United States. Japan's Navy is now larger than that of Britain, and Japan's technological cooperation with the U.S. anti-missile defense program locks its future security into the American alliance.

While China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue expressed deep concern at the great changes of Japan's military defense strategy and its possible impact, Tokyo said Beijing had only itself to blame - Japan must watch closely the modernization of Chinese armies.

For the 15th year in a row, China's defense budget has again recorded double-digit growth, and while Beijing's official figures claim it spends a mere $26 billion a year, the U.S. estimates this year's spending at $55 billion, and possibly as high as $70 billion when including the space and satellite programs, oceanographic research and security costs for the National Oil Corporation.

The rising military spending in the region is making some analysts nervous. Throw in Taiwan's own re-armament program and the South Korean defense budget, and the share of the U.S. defense budget devoted to the region, and the total military spending in east Asia is now well over $200 billion a year. This is probably the highest share of global military expenditure the region has boasted since the Korean War.

Moreover, the money is being spent, and the national strategic programs rewritten at a time of great uncertainty over North Korea's nuclear capabilities and ambitions.

North Korea has yet to comment officially, but its state-run new agency criticized Japan for intensifying regional conditions to extremes and added that Pyongyang would definitely not just stand idly by and watch Japan become a military power.

Everybody is blaming everybody else. Japan blames North Korea, and North Korea blames Japan. Taiwan blames China, and China blames Japan.

Fundamentally, the Chinese buildup has been due to Taiwan's push for independence and the U.S. and Japan's direct and indirect backing of Taiwan, argues Shen Dingli of the Institute for International Studies at China's Fudan University. Therefore, Japan has to be responsible for this and should not say China is the source of regional instability.

This is getting dangerous. The world has seen this kind of regional psychosis take hold before, a time when every country blames everybody else for rising tensions, and they all ratchet up the bellicose rhetoric and the various defense budgets and start the technology arms races. Europe went down this path in the years before 1914, and we know how that ended. East Asia is becoming a very troubling place.

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