Air Self-Defence Force fighters scrambled to intercept foreign aircraft approaching Japanese airspace a record number of times between April and December last year, with the vast majority of the incidents involving Chinese warplanes testing Japan’s air defences around the islands of Okinawa. Japanese air units are operating under regulations that have been revised in recent years to raise the threshold for interception flights, a military analyst told the South China Morning Post , meaning that if anything the increase in flights probing Japan’s air defences is even more pronounced than the latest figures indicate. According to the defence ministry, ASDF fighters were scrambled to intercept 785 inbound flights in the latter nine months of 2021, the highest figure for the same period in the last five years. The total exceeded the 725 incidents in the whole of the 2020-2021 financial year. Japanese fighters were ordered to meet Chinese aircraft 571 times during the nine-month period, up 240 incidents from the previous year and accounting for more than 70 per cent of the cases. Interceptions of Russian aircraft accounted for the majority of the other cases, with 199 incidents. That figure, however, was down by seven from the previous year. Garren Mulloy, a professor of international relations at Daito Bunka University and an authority on defence matters, said the growing number of cases appeared to be a continuation of the “incremental” increases that had been reported in southwest Japan in the last decade or so, coinciding with a dispute between Tokyo and Beijing over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. In tandem with Chinese coastguard ships, Chinese aircraft have tested Japanese reactions around islands known in Japan as the Senkakus. Beijing claims sovereignty over the islands, which it refers to as the Diaoyus . “This increase is pretty much in line with what we have seen before, but it is difficult to know from the data the number of situations in which they did not scramble units last year under the new policy for interceptions,” he said. In the past, Japanese fighters would be launched from Kadena Air Base, in Okinawa, as soon as radar detected Chinese aircraft taking off from military facilities in China’s Fujian province. The ASDF needed to respond rapidly as the flight time to the Senkaku Islands was similar to the time it would take the Chinese to reach the area. “But the Chinese military is now flying so frequently all along the coast that it was becoming impossible for the Japanese to respond to every take-off,” Mulloy said. “It would very quickly have exhausted the Japanese aircraft and their pilots.” The new requirements for a scramble to be ordered require the foreign aircraft to actually approach Japan’s Air Defence Zone or airspace over the East China Sea, he said. “This means the number of predictive scrambles has been reduced, which means that the increase we have seen in the last nine months were direct approaches to Japanese airspace rather than what might be termed ambient threats, so the increase in the overall number of flights detected would have been even higher,” he added. Rucndprk? If Japan joins Aukus, what will China, Russia, North Korea do? Concern over coordinated actions Another growing concern in Tokyo is the increase in coordinated actions by the Chinese and Russian militaries, as was seen last year when warships of the two nations carried out joint exercises in the Sea of Japan and then completed a circumnavigation of the archipelago. “That, to Tokyo, is very worrying as it is more difficult to assess the scale of the threat and Japanese fighters would have to scramble in two or even three directions to meet a series of threats,” Mulloy pointed out. The release of the report on the increased approaches to Japanese airspace coincides with the announcement that Japan and the United States are to deploy unmanned Reaper drones at an SDF base for the first time. Seven MQ-9 drones, produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of the US, are to be stationed at the Maritime Self-Defence Force base at Kanoya, Kagoshima prefecture, within the coming weeks. Around 100 US military personnel are to be deployed to initially operate and maintain the aircraft, which have undergone extensive testing at the hands of the Japanese coastguard. Those test flights, conducted last year in Aomori prefecture, have confirmed that the maritime variants of the drones are effective at identifying and tracking ships across vast expanses of ocean. The coastguard, which also intends to use the aircraft for search-and-rescue missions, presently operates a fleet of 33 fixed-wing aircraft and 52 helicopters, meaning its equipment is stretched thin at a time of increasing demands, particularly in areas of southwest Japan. In addition to new equipment, the Japanese government has announced that it will start work on developing Mageshima Island, off Kagoshima prefecture, as an SDF base that will also be available to US forces for drills. The uninhabited island was used as an airfield for Japanese air attacks against Allied forces invading Okinawa in the closing stages of World War II, but it will require a complete rebuild of the facilities. The plan is for US fighter aircraft that are presently required to fly to Iwo Jima to carry out landing practices to conduct drills much closer to their land bases. Mageshima is also conveniently located far closer to Okinawa and can serve as a staging base in the event of a military emergency in southern Japan.