Japan

China
Japan's counter to China in the East China Sea began in 2010, two years before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took power, as a result of the growing influence of China and the relative decline of the U.S. in the region. The defense, foreign, and finance ministers in a government led by the Democratic Party of Japan responded to years of double-digit growth in China's defense spending with a straegy to make the defense of Japanese islands a priority.

Tensions with China sharpened after 2012, due to Abe's revisionism that downplayed Japan's wartime past and Sino-Japanese flare-ups over the tiny islands. After external pressure to abandon its decades-old home island defense in favor of exerting its military power in Asia, Japan fortified its far-flung island chain in the East China Sea. Chinese ships sailing from their eastern seaboard had to pass through the seamless barrier of Japanese missile batteries to reach the Western Pacific. However, after decades hosting the biggest concentration of U.S. troops in Asia, many of the people on the islands voiced greater opposition to the military footprint. In the wake of the dispute, a Chinese coastguard ship equipped what four gun turrets was sighted near the islands in the East China Sea on December 23, 2015.

Middle East
While many assumed Japan's more muscular security policy in 2015 was driven solely by the conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Gulf War of 1991 firmed Japan's resolve to move away from the state pacifism that had defined the country by constitution since its defeat in World War II. Unable to send troops, Japan at the time instead contributed $13 billion to help fund the U.S. military operation, while it bought 90% of its oil from the Middle East. As a direct consequence of that humiliation, Japan in 1992 enacted a contentious law allowing its military to take part in U.N. peacekeeping operations. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Japan passed antoher one-off law allowing its tankers to refuel U.S. and other allied warships supporting the invasion of Afghanistan; Japan's air force also flew supplies into Iraq from a base in Kuwait in 2003.

In September 2015, Abe pushed through legislation allowing Japanese troops to fight abroad for the first time since World War II; however, the biggest impetus was the obvious surge of Chinese power.