The Ghost of Unit 731

When Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi stood on Yonaguni Island in November 2025, announcing the deployment of Type 03 medium-range surface-to-air missiles barely 110 kilometers from Taiwan, he was signaling something far more profound than a military-technical decision: Japan’s decisive break from its post-war self-restraint and its deeper integration into Washington’s containment architecture against China. What makes this moment particularly ominous is not the deployment itself, but the historical amnesia that enables it.

Between 1931 and 1945, Japanese militarism claimed tens of millions of lives across Asia, with China bearing the overwhelming brunt. The notorious Unit 731, commanded by General Shiro Ishii, conducted biological warfare experiments on thousands of human subjects, while associated attacks contributed to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. These were not rogue excesses but systematic state policy, sanctioned at the highest levels of the Imperial government.

What followed was no less revealing of great-power cynicism. Rather than face full justice at the Tokyo Trials, Ishii and many subordinates received de facto immunity from the United States in exchange for their research data. Washington’s calculus was brutally simple: biowarfare intelligence was deemed more valuable than accountability to Asian victims. Several Unit 731 personnel later built careers in post-war Japan’s medical and pharmaceutical institutions. That foundational bargain foreshadowed a relationship in which strategic advantage repeatedly outweighed historical reckoning.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Japan’s defense spending is projected at 9.9 trillion yen (roughly 1.8 percent of GDP), continuing a multi-year Defence Buildup Program aimed at reaching 2 percent by 2027. The deployment of F-35B fighters, development of long-range missiles with ranges of several thousand kilometers, and acquisition of 400 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles mark a decisive shift from a strictly territorial posture toward genuine long-range strike capability.

This transformation is codified in the “three new strategic documents” adopted in December 2022, which explicitly embrace “counterstrike capabilities” allowing Japan to hit targets on an attacking state’s territory. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s framing of a Taiwan contingency as a “survival-threatening situation” signals readiness to treat conflict over what Beijing calls an internal matter as grounds for Japanese military action.

From a South Asian strategic perspective, this trajectory is deeply troubling. The pattern recalls colonial-era practices of external powers manipulating intra-Asian rivalries to maintain primacy—Britain’s “divide and rule” in the subcontinent now echoed in Washington’s efforts to build layered security networks encircling China. The emerging web of arrangements—US-Japan, AUKUS, the Quad, Japan-Philippines and Japan-Australia Reciprocal Access Agreements, and trilateral US-Japan-ROK mechanisms—increasingly functions as a de facto lattice of mini-blocs.

India has been notably cautious about this architecture. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has repeatedly stressed that India has “never been a treaty ally” and does not seek that kind of rigid alliance framework, reflecting deep wariness of being locked into another power’s escalation ladder. For New Delhi, the lesson of twentieth-century history is clear: when Asian states are drawn into formal alliance systems designed elsewhere, they often pay the heaviest price when crises erupt.

The present moment is particularly dangerous because it combines three volatile elements: unresolved historical grievances, rapid military buildups, and intensifying great-power rivalry. China’s response has been predictably sharp: Beijing warns that any Japanese military role in a Taiwan conflict would be met with crushing force and routinely underscores its capacity to strike across the first island chain with ballistic, cruise, and increasingly hypersonic systems.

What should concern the wider region is how quickly Japan’s “exclusively defense-oriented policy” is being stretched. For seven decades, Article 9 of the constitution—renouncing war as a sovereign right—served as both legal and normative brake on military adventurism. Today, without formal constitutional revision, successive reinterpretations and the 2022 strategic documents have normalized capabilities that previous generations would have regarded as incompatible with Article 9’s spirit.

On Yonaguni, the human consequences are visible in microcosm. The island’s roughly 1,500 residents now find themselves living beside an expanded garrison and, soon, batteries of missiles intended to plug gaps in the southwest island chain. Once discussed as a potential bridge for ferry links with Taiwan, Yonaguni is being turned into a forward node in a contested battle-space—its inhabitants repeatedly told that their home is a likely target in any future war.

From New Delhi’s vantage point, the implications extend beyond East Asia. India’s own history with China—most notably the 1962 war and recurring border crises—has created legitimate security concerns, but successive Indian governments have also recognized that great-power confrontation in Asia rarely serves long-term regional prosperity. The temptation to see Japanese remilitarization as a convenient counterweight to China must be weighed against the pattern in which one Asian power is armed and encouraged to confront another, only for resulting conflicts to devastate Asian societies while external patrons remain insulated.

None of this excuses Chinese assertiveness in the South and East China Seas or along the Himalayan frontier. China’s coast guard and maritime militia operations around disputed reefs have fueled deep anxiety across the region. Yet there remains a meaningful distinction between addressing these challenges through diplomatic mechanisms, confidence-building, and adherence to international law—including UNCLOS—and racing toward a heavily militarized first island chain bristling with missile systems.

Historical denial further poisons the well. While individual Japanese citizens, including surviving veterans who later expressed remorse in China, have taken personal steps toward atonement, official statements from Tokyo have remained carefully calibrated around “regret” rather than full acknowledgment of wartime atrocities. This ambiguity makes Chinese and Korean suspicions of Japanese remilitarization more than mere propaganda; against the backdrop of Unit 731’s unpunished crimes, they appear as rational strategic caution.

The path forward demands political courage from all sides. Japan must accept that genuine security cannot rest solely on missile shields and counterstrike doctrine, nor on becoming the tip of an American spear in East Asia; deeper reconciliation with its wartime record is equally a security imperative. China needs to recognize that opaque military modernization and coercive gray-zone tactics directly strengthen the case for the very containment posture it denounces. The United States must rethink a Cold War reflex that defaults to alliance-building and forward deployments, even in a nuclear-armed, deeply interdependent Asia where miscalculation would be catastrophic.

For the rest of Asia—from India and Indonesia to South Korea and ASEAN’s smaller states—the wisest course remains strategic autonomy: resisting pressure to join rigid blocs while engaging with multiple partners on terms that preserve independent decision-making. The spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, despite its limitations, still offers a useful reminder that Asian security problems require Asian-led solutions rather than imported alliance templates.

The missiles on Yonaguni are more than hardware; they are symbols of a choice between two futures. One is a region organized around competing military blocs, historical grievances left to fester, and young Asians once again asked to bleed for strategies devised elsewhere. The other is an Asia that confronts the ghosts of Unit 731 and Nanjing directly, builds genuine reconciliation, and constructs security through dialogue and restraint rather than an arms race in the shadows of past atrocities. The window for choosing the latter is narrowing—but it has not yet closed.