Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world. Plus, their workforce is highly trained in technology.
If Japan decided their safety required a fleet of submarines with nuclear missiles, I’m sure they could create it in record time.
Japan may not have the military potential to be a superpower, like the USA or China, but they have the military potential to make anyone who messes with them wish they hadn’t.
N. Korea, China, & Russia (who are all on Japan’s doorstep) will all rue the day they backed Japan into a corner and forced the country to seriously take up arms again.
Concur as stated below in post 6
I was stationed in Japan for two years in the Navy and have seen some of their naval forces up close. Believe me, the Japanese Maritime “Self-Defense” Force could easily take on a lot of the world’s navies.
Japan’s debut as a major power came about when they soundly defeated the Russian Navy in the Sea of Japan in 1905.
“The Battle of Tsushima (Russian: Цусимское сражение, Tsusimskoye srazheniye), also known as the Battle of Tsushima Strait and the Naval Battle of the Sea of Japan (Japanese: 日本海海戦, Nihonkai-Kaisen) in Japan, was a major naval battle fought between Russia and Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. It was naval history's first decisive sea battle fought by modern steel battleship fleets, and the first naval battle in which wireless telegraphy (radio) played a critically important role. It has been characterized as the "dying echo of the old era – for the last time in the history of naval warfare, ships of the line of a beaten fleet surrendered on the high seas".
It was fought on 27–28 May 1905 (14–15 May in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) in the Tsushima Strait located between Korea and southern Japan. In this battle the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō destroyed two-thirds of the Russian fleet, under Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had traveled over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) to reach the Far East. In London in 1906, Sir George Sydenham Clarke wrote, "The battle of Tsu-shima is by far the greatest and the most important naval event since Trafalgar"; decades later, historian Edmund Morris agreed with this judgment. The destruction of the fleet caused a bitter reaction from the Russian public, which induced a peace treaty in September 1905 without any further battles.”