Japan and the United States issued an interim report on the revision of the Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation on Oct. 8, making significant changes to the original bilateral defense guidelines introduced in 1978. Though technically the two nations are not legally bound by the report, the changes deserve attention.

On Wednesday, the United States and Japan released an interim report on updating their defense cooperation guidelines. [File photo]

The geographical limits stipulated in the 1978 defense guidelines have been removed by last week's revisions, enabling Japan to help its U.S. ally in wars in any corner of the world. This is in line with the new constitutional interpretation the Shinzo Abe cabinet made this July, which allowed Japan to participate in collective self-defense overseas.

Why are Japan and the U.S. revising their defense guidelines? Japanese right-wing media outlet Sankei Shimbun argued that though the report did not mention China by name, it alluded to the China threat in quite a vivid fashion. The guidelines discuss the two allies' cooperation in a "global" context though, some Japanese media simply singled out the two countries' growing antagonism with China to cater to anti-China sentiment in Japan.

Re-identifying an imaginary enemy and the scope of cooperation

When Japan and its American ally first formulated the defense guidelines in 1978, they had the Soviet Union in mind. Though the Soviet Union did not seek any land from Japan after World War II, the Japan-U.S. alliance needed an imaginary enemy to survive at that time.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Japan-U.S. military alliance lost its purpose. The Japanese media then turned to the North Korea threat. A country with a population equal to only one fifth of Japan's and with only one eighty-third of Japan's average GDP, North Korea is by no means a threat to Japan. Though that theory hardly held water, Japan kept focusing on the threat to maintain its close ties with the U.S.

During recent years, when right-wing Japanese provoked territorial disputes between Japan and China, some Japanese media outlets began to call for the Japan-U.S. alliance to set its sights on China.

The original defense guidelines established three categories for the state of operations: "normal," "contingency," and an intermediate state falling short of military attacks. But the three states have been eliminated by the revisions, giving Japan and the U.S. the right to cooperate militarily anytime anywhere - a situation the report has termed a "seamless" coordination.

The greatest change lies, however, in the re-identification of the imaginary enemy and the in-depth cooperation between Japan and the U.S. in space and cyberspace technology.