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.
I should add that their constitution bans them from building "offensive weaponry," so they (theoretically) don't have ballistic missiles, bombers, or ships capable of offensive action.
You know, like submarines.