TOKYO: Japan needs to boost its military with a “sense of urgency and crisis”, its defence minister said on Tuesday, as a new government assessment again highlighted growing risks from China, North Korea and Russia.

Japan is already beefing up military spending and security cooperation in Asia, deploying missile launchers to outer islands, moving to acquire “counter-strike” capabilities, and easing rules on weapons exports.

But Shinjiro Koizumi said in a preface to the annual defence white paper that it was “imperative that Japan further reinforce and transform its defence capabilities with a stronger sense of urgency and crisis than ever before”.

In the Asia-Pacific “not only are China and North Korea further strengthening their military capabilities, China-Russia and Russia-North Korea are also reinforcing their cooperation”, he added.

The white paper said China was “intensifying its activities” in the region around Japan, “extending beyond the so-called first island chain to the second island chain”.

The document listed a series of incidents in 2025, including activities by Chinese aircraft carriers and the “unusual close approach” by Chinese aircraft to Japanese planes in two incidents in June and July.

A spokesman for China’s defence ministry said the white paper was “filled with false narratives”. “This is a classic case of shifting the blame onto others, and an excuse to loosen (Japan’s) own military constraints,” said Chen Xi, according to an online post by the defence ministry.

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2026