I haven’t paid attention to the Japanese navy.
The last thing I remember they had a small Defense Force instead of an army but were talking about expanding it for a “more aggressive defensive posture “.
Any word on that?
With their nuclear energy program, who’s to say they don’t already have some nukes stashed away somewhere?
Japan is in the top ten worldwide for military spending. They have 4th-gen Mitsubishi MBT's with, as I understand, high-end onboard tech, 5th gen fighters and drones, and license-built Apache helicopters. Japan's navy is the fifth largest in the world, their ships are equipped with Aegis systems. They are building (or have already built, can't remember) a helicopter carrier, and have fairly recently started aggressively building up their submarine fleet (watch a launch ceremony on youtube -- enough gongs, banners, and rising suns to make you think you've fallen backwards in time to imperial Japan). I saw some Japanese ships and sailors docked at Newport Naval Station a few years back and they looked pretty impressive, not that that necessarily means anything.
Not to mention, the stereotype in Japan is that servicemen are mostly rural-dwellers from Kyushu -- in other words, the Japanese version of southern rednecks.