Japan defense chief’s stark warning after watching emergency scramble drill

Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi flew to Chitose Air Base in Hokkaido on May 23 to watch his pilots rehearse one of the most demanding routine missions in the Japanese military: launching fighter jets on emergency intercept against Russian military aircraft approaching the country’s airspace.

After the drill, standing before reporters at the northernmost major air base in Japan, he called Russia’s military behavior in the region combined with its deepening coordination with China “a serious defense concern,” citing the Far East and the Northern Territories as areas of sustained military pressure that Tokyo can no longer treat as background noise.

Chitose sits in the heart of Hokkaido, Japan’s large northern island, positioned to respond to aircraft approaching from Sakhalin, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the chain of disputed islands Japan calls the Northern Territories and Russia administers as its own territory. The pilots stationed there have accumulated their knowledge of Russian flight patterns through hundreds of real intercept missions rather than classroom exercises, and the operational tempo at the base reflects how seriously Tokyo takes the northern approach corridor.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighters 595 times during fiscal year 2025, with Russian aircraft triggering 214 of those intercepts, meaning Japanese pilots launched against Russian military planes roughly four times a week for an entire year. Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers, long-range nuclear-capable aircraft that Moscow has operated for decades and continues to modernize, probe Japan’s air defense identification zone on a rhythm that JASDF alert crews track with grim familiarity. Russian naval patrol aircraft run the Sea of Japan corridor on separate tracks. Russian fighters occasionally escort the bombers on more assertive passes, and Japan responds with armed jets every time, because every approach is treated as potentially serious until proven otherwise.

What Koizumi specifically cited during his Chitose remarks was a December 2025 mission that showed how the Russian and Chinese threats have become operationally intertwined. Two Russian Tu-95 bombers rendezvoused over the East China Sea with two Chinese H-6 strategic bombers, joining a formation that also included eight Chinese J-16 fighters and a Russian A-50 airborne command aircraft. Together they conducted an eight-hour patrol around Japan, passing through the channel between Okinawa and Miyako Island before swinging out into the Western Pacific. Koizumi described the flight as clearly intended as a demonstration against Japan and a serious concern for national security. South Korea scrambled its own jets in response, with seven Russian and two Chinese aircraft having entered Seoul’s air defense identification zone during the same mission.

That December flight was the tenth joint strategic air patrol conducted by Russia and China since they launched the program in 2019, and the broader pattern it represents has become a structural feature of Japan’s security environment rather than a series of isolated incidents. Russia and China have built a coordinated operational rhythm around Japan that forces the JASDF to respond in multiple directions simultaneously, with Chinese carrier-based fighters conducting exercises near Okinawa in the southwest while Russian bombers press from the north. In December, a Chinese J-15 fighter launched from the carrier Liaoning locked its targeting radar onto a JASDF F-15 for around thirty minutes near Okinawa, an act that in operational terms signals a potential attack and forces the targeted pilot to take immediate evasive decisions. The two countries do not share a formal military alliance, but the coordination between their operations near Japan has reached a level of consistency that Tokyo’s defense planners now treat as a combined strategic challenge rather than two separate bilateral problems.

Japan’s response to this environment has been substantial and deliberate. The government approved a doubling of the defense budget as a share of the economy starting in 2022, funding new F-35 stealth fighters that have been arriving in growing numbers to supplement the older F-15J interceptors that remain the backbone of the JASDF’s scramble force. Japan has also formally adopted what it calls counterstrike capability, meaning the legal and operational framework to strike an adversary’s military facilities before they can be used to attack Japan, rather than absorbing the first blow and responding afterward. These changes mark a fundamental shift in what Japan is prepared to do, and they reflect a security calculation driven precisely by the kind of sustained pressure that Koizumi watched his pilots train against at Chitose.

Hokkaido has not traditionally been the focus of Japan’s defense conversation, which has centered in recent years on the southwestern islands near Taiwan and the threat posed by Chinese naval expansion. Koizumi’s visit to Chitose on May 23 was a signal that the northern flank deserves equal attention, that the Russian military presence in the Far East is not a legacy concern from a previous era but an active and growing operational reality, and that the coordination between Moscow and Beijing means pressure on one front cannot be separated from pressure on the other. The pilots at Chitose will keep launching every time Russian aircraft approach, because the alternative is conceding that the approaches go uncontested, and that is not a concession Japan’s government is prepared to make.