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 The United States, believing its Asian allies - and Japan in
particular - must help contain growing Chinese military power, has
pushed Japan to abandon its decades-old bare-bones home island
defense in favor of exerting its military power in Asia.
Tokyo is responding by stringing a line of anti-ship, anti-aircraft
missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea stretching
1,400 km (870 miles) from the country's mainland toward Taiwan.
Interviews with a dozen military planners and government
policymakers reveal that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's broader goal to
beef up the military has evolved to include a strategy to dominate
the sea and air surrounding the remote islands.
While the installations are not secret, it is the first time such
officials have spelled out that the deployment will help keep China
at bay in the Western Pacific and amounts to a Japanese version of
the "anti-access/area denial" doctrine, known as "A2/AD" in military
jargon, that China is using to try to push the United States and its
allies out of the region.
 Chinese ships sailing from their eastern seaboard must pass through
this seamless barrier of Japanese missile batteries to reach the
Western Pacific, access to which is vital to Beijing both as a
supply line to the rest of the world's oceans and for the projection
of its naval power.
China's President Xi Jinping has set great store in developing an
ocean-going "blue water" navy capable of defending the country's
growing global interests.
To be sure, there is nothing to stop Chinese warships from sailing
through under international law, but they will have to do so in
within the crosshairs of Japanese missiles, the officials told
Reuters.
FIRST ISLAND CHAIN
As Beijing asserts more control across the nearby South China Sea
with almost completed island bases, the string of islands stretching
through Japan's East China Sea territory and south through the
Philippines may come to define a boundary between U.S. and Chinese
spheres of influence. Military planners dub this the line the "first
island chain".
"In the next five or six years the first island chain will be
crucial in the military balance between China and the U.S.- Japan,"
said Satoshi Morimoto, a Takushoku University professor who was
defense minister in 2012 and advises the current defense chief, Gen
Nakatani.
A U.S. warship in late October challenged territorial limits that
China is asserting around its new man-made island bases in the
Spratly archipelago.
 But Beijing may already have established "facts on the ground" in
securing military control of the South China Sea, some officials and
experts say.
"We may delay the inevitable, but that train left the station some
time ago," a senior U.S. military source familiar with Asia told
Reuters, on condition he was not identified because he was not
authorized to talk to the media.
China's "ultimate objective is hegemony over the South China Sea,
hegemony over the East China Sea", said Kevin Maher, who headed the
U.S. State Department's Office of Japan Affairs for two years until
2011. "To try and appease the Chinese would just encourage the
Chinese to be more provocative," said Maher, now a consultant at NMV
Consulting in Washington.
TURNING THE TABLES
Japan's counter to China in the East China Sea began in 2010, two
years before Abe took power.
The predecessor Democratic Party of Japan government pivoted away
from protecting the northern island of Hokkaido against a Soviet
invasion that never came to defending the southwest island chain.
"The growing influence of China and the relative decline of the U.S.
was a factor," said Akihisa Nagashima, a DPJ lawmaker who as vice
minister of defense helped craft that change. "We wanted to do what
we could and help ensure the sustainability of the U.S. forward
deployment."
China is investing in precision missiles as it seeks to deter the
technologically superior U.S. Navy from plying waters or flying near
Taiwan or in the South China Sea.
Beijing in September gave friends and potential foes a peek at that
growing firepower in its biggest ever military parade, which
commemorated Japan's World War Two defeat. Making its debut was the
Dongfeng-21D, a still untested anti-ship ballistic missile that
could potentially destroy a $5 billion U.S. aircraft carrier.
 It joins an arsenal the U.S. Congress estimates at 1,200 short-range
missiles and intermediate missiles that can strike anywhere along
the first island chain. China is also developing submarine- and
land-launched radar-evading cruise missiles.
"Rather than A2/AD, we use the phrase 'maritime supremacy and air
superiority'," said Yosuke Isozaki, Abe's first security adviser
until September and a key author of a national defense strategy
published in 2013 that included this phrase for the first time.
"Our thinking was that we wanted to be able to ensure maritime
supremacy and air superiority that fit with the U.S. military," he
added.
Toshi Yoshihara, a U.S. Naval War College professor, said Tokyo
could play an important role in limiting China's room for maneuver
through the East China Sea to the Western Pacific, enhancing U.S.
freedom of movement and buying time for the alliance to respond in
the event of war with China.
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"You could say Japan is turning the tables on China," Yoshihara
said.
Memories of Japanese aggression in World War Two still haunt Tokyo's
relations with its near neighbors, and tensions have sharpened since
the return to power of Abe, who critics view as a revisionist who
wants to downplay Japan's wartime past.
"Any Japanese military trend will elicit close attention and
misgivings from Asian neighboring countries," China's National
Defense Ministry told Reuters by email in reply to questions about
Japan's island strategy.
"We urge the Japanese side to take history as a mirror, and take
more actions in the interests of growing mutual trust."
Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet,
cast Japan's build-up in the East China Sea as complementary to a
broader U.S. strategy.
"The U.S. planning process for any theater takes into consideration
the capabilities and forces of friends and potential adversaries,"
Aucoin told Reuters. "The U.S plans with the ultimate objective of
maintaining peace and stability not only for Japan, but also for the
region."
MISSILES BATTERIES, RADAR STATIONS
Over the next five years, Japan will increase its Self-Defense
Forces on islands in the East China Sea by about a fifth to almost
10,000 personnel.
Those troops, manning missile batteries and radar stations, will be
backed up by marine units on the mainland, stealthy submarines, F-35
warplanes, amphibious fighting vehicles, aircraft carriers as big as
World War Two flat-tops and ultimately the U.S. Seventh Fleet
headquartered at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.
Already cooperating closely, the Japanese and U.S. navies will draw
closer than ever after Abe's new security legislation legitimized
collective self-defense, allowing Japan to come to the aid of allies
under attack.
One crucial change, said Maher: the U.S. and Japanese military can
now plan and practice for war together and deliver a "force
multiplier".
Bigger defense outlays are adding potency. Japan's military is
seeking spending in the next fiscal year's budget that would top 5
trillion yen ($40 billion) for the first time, including money for
longer-range anti-ship missiles, sub-hunting aircraft, early-warning
planes, Global Hawk drones, Osprey tiltrotor aircraft and a new
heavy-lift, long-range transport jet.
In some areas, however, Japan's military is making do. Anti-ship
missiles designed 30 years ago to destroy Soviet landing craft
heading for Hokkaido are being deployed to draw the defensive
curtain along the southwest island chain.
Able to lob a 225-kg (500-lb) warhead 180 km, they have enough range
to cover the gaps between the islands along the chain, said Noboru
Yamaguchi, a Sasakawa Peace Foundation adviser and former general
who procured them three decades ago.
Japan's military planners must also figure out how to transform an
army used to sticking close to its bases into a more mobile,
expeditionary force.
Decades of under-investment in logistics means Japan has too few
naval transport ships and military aircraft to carry large numbers
of troops and equipment.
A more delicate task for Japan's government, however, may be
persuading people living along the islands to accept a bigger
military footprint. After decades hosting the biggest concentration
of U.S. troops in Asia, people on Okinawa are voicing greater
opposition to the bases.
For now, communities on the long chain of islands, home to 1.5
million people, that have been asked to host Japanese troops are
happy to do so, said Ryota Takeda, a lawmaker who as vice defense
minister until Sept. 2014 traveled there frequently to win
residents' approval for new deployments.
"Unlike officials sitting in the Ministry of Defense in Tokyo they
are more attuned to the threat they face every day."
(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in Tokyo and Megha Rajagopalan
in Beijing; Editing by Dean Yates, William Mallard and Alex
Richardson)
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