Japan Ground Self-Defense Force - History

History

Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration in 1945, and, based on Potsdam Declaration Article 9, the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy were dismantled. Both were replaced by United States Armed Forces occupation force, which assumed responsibility for the defense of Japan.

On the outbreak of the Korean War, many U.S. units were transferred to Korea, and Japan was perceived as lacking defences. Encouraged by the American occupation authorities, the Japanese government in July 1950 authorized the establishment of a National Police Reserve, consisting of 75,000 men equipped with light infantry weapons. Under the terms of the Mutual Security Assistance Pact, ratified in 1952 along with the peace treaty Japan had signed with the United States and other countries, United States forces stationed in Japan were to deal with external aggression against Japan while Japanese forces, both ground and maritime, would deal with internal threats and natural disasters. Accordingly, in mid-1952 the National Police Reserve was expanded to 110,000 men and named the National Safety Forces.

The building of the defense ability advanced, and, on July 1, 1954, the National Security Board was reorganized by the Defense Agency, and the National Security Force was reorganized afterwards as the Ground Self-Defense Force, the Marine Self Defense Force, the Air Self-Defense Force.

For a long period, the effectiveness of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force to hold off a Soviet invasion of Hokkaido was in doubt, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in 1972 that it seemed optimized to fight ‘a Soviet invasion conducted on American patterns of a quarter of a century ago.’ While the force is now an efficient army of 148,000, its apparent importance has declined with the end of the Cold War, and attempts to reorient the forces as a whole to new post Cold War missions have been tangled in a series of internal political disputes.