For a country known in the West for its historic — and more often fictional — ninjas and samurai, Japan hardly has a strong military. In fact, Japan’s defense ministry recently announced that suicides in the Japanese armed forces are on the rise.

This reflects, among other things, low morale in the ranks and the relatively low respect that the Japanese accord their armed forces. During World War II, Japanese soldiers were killing themselves out of excessive pride in their military traditions.

Today, they may perhaps be doing it because of a lack of military traditions. Neither extreme is desirable, nor is a weak Japan in the interests of the United States.

During the war, Japan was a top-tier world power, albeit a thoroughly undemocratic and malignant one. The bloody fighting and atrocities that happened in the Pacific Theater were largely the result of Japanese aggression. With this in mind, the U.S. military occupation forces in Japan rewrote the country’s constitution in consultation with Japan’s new government.

One of the 1947 constitution’s key provisions stated, “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” By hard-wiring pacifism into the Japanese constitution, the U.S. hoped to prevent another war.

Despite their foreign origins, the American officers who drafted this constitution clearly captured the contemporary spirit of the Japanese people; Japanese public sentiment was fiercely pacifist for decades after the war. The U.S. had abetted a complete transformation of the cultural attitudes of the Japanese people toward their own defense affairs.

Unfortunately, encouraging such an outcome may have been a backward-looking miscalculation, though few could have predicted it at the time.

While, unlike Taiwan or South Korea, Japan has never faced the need to defend itself from the communist menace, the possibility of a shooting war involving the country was most definitely hanging over the region during the Cold War and still lingers today. In 1946, before the new Japanese constitution was even finished, North Korea was founded as a Soviet client state. In 1949, a communist government seized control of China. By 1953, when the Korean War ended, it was clear that Japan needed some basic defense capability; a meager “self defense force” was established, but even this was highly controversial.

Whereas Western European countries maintained strong armies during the Cold War, the nature of Japan’s constitution meant that Japan relied almost completely on the United States for its defense — and continues to do so today.

Compared even to Europe, Japan spends trivial amounts of its GDP on defense. This is despite the fact that Japan has by and large overcome the terrible sins of its past and is now a democratic nation that, like the U.S. and Europe, can foster a proud military tradition without becoming bent on world domination.

The election of Taro Aso as Japan’s new prime minister is therefore a positive development. Aso wants to adopt a less passive foreign policy for Japan, not only by boosting the strength of the Japanese military to maintain the balance of power in the Far East but also by continuing commitments Japan has made to assist in peacekeeping and anti-terrorism efforts.

The U.S. should welcome him as someone who may help Japan finally take up its rights and responsibilities as a democratic world power.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com