Japan isn’t just selling warships — it’s quietly building a new Indo-Pacific security architecture in the shadow of China’s rise, amid uncertainty in US leadership.
This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Japan is actively marketing its advanced, stealthy Mogami-class frigate to international buyers as the country aggressively rolls back decades-old restrictions on lethal arms exports to counter a rapid Chinese naval buildup and fluctuating US security commitments.
Manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), the highly automated warship can hunt submarines, deploy underwater drones, and operate with a lean crew of just 90 personnel — a critical selling point for nations facing severe sailor shortages, though critics warn the reduced staffing compromises real-time damage control during combat.
Priced at approximately US$710 million per vessel according to Japan’s 2025 defense budget, the Mogami offers a stark, cost-effective alternative to the US Navy’s troubled next-generation Constellation-class frigate program, which has been severely plagued by design delays, cancellations, and a ballooning unit cost of $1.4 billion.
Driven by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s overhaul of national defense policy amid the region’s most volatile security environment since World War II, Japan secured a landmark $6.5 billion defense contract with Australia in April to deliver three upgraded variants by 2029 while transferring local manufacturing technology.
Meanwhile, other regional Indo-Pacific nations, including New Zealand and Indonesia, are actively considering the warship to modernize their fleets.
In that sense, the Mogami may be less a naval platform than a vehicle for knitting together a network of regional partners through shared technology, logistics and industrial cooperation.
Japan’s push may be aimed at a capability gap among US allies and partners that the US is increasingly unable to fill on its own. Smaller regional navies in the Indo-Pacific rely on general-purpose, relatively affordable frigates as the workhorses of their fleets, but the US does not build frigates on any appreciable scale or at a feasible cost.
Should Japan’s frigate sales in the Indo-Pacific materialize, they would significantly streamline interoperability, training, and supply chains, benefiting smaller regional navies.
It would allow smaller regional navies, such as New Zealand’s, to integrate into the modernization plans of larger ones, such as Australia’s, with both navies already highly interoperable. Such an approach could minimize capability gaps while enabling shared training programs and a spare parts pool.
Beyond the mere sale of frigates, Japan’s marketing push may signal its efforts to build a coalition of like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific to address uncertainties about US security commitments. Specifically, the frigates could serve as a focal point for defense diplomacy between Japan and its partners.
Sales of high-end military items, such as frigates, don’t end with the delivery of the ships themselves. More than that, customers purchase the entire sustainment package behind the ship that sustains it for its service life.
This package includes spare parts, maintenance, training, and software updates, to name a few. These frigates, therefore, help cement a long-term defense relationship between Japan and its partners.
Rather than supplanting the US-led alliance system, Japan’s frigate push may reinforce it by creating horizontal links among allies that have traditionally relied on the US as the sole hub. Such links could make regional security cooperation less dependent on US resources and political attention.
However, the challenge for Japan in sustaining this hub-to-hub defense relationship is to broaden those relationships beyond defense into related fields and to strengthen them from the transactional to the institutional level.
Beyond a defense relationship, Japan’s possible frigate sales could bolster its partners’ economic resilience, addressing an often-cited gap in the traditional US-led hub-and-spoke security architecture in the Indo-Pacific.
The US-led regional order has often struggled to translate security ties into equally robust economic relationships. This imbalance has left many allies and partners seeking deeper economic engagement alongside existing security ties.
China has demonstrated how economic relationships can reinforce strategic influence, most visibly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southeast Asia and export dependencies on its large market.
China’s economic investments in Indonesia may be a significant factor in Indonesia’s restraint in dealing with China, especially on issues such as the Natuna Islands dispute. That dynamic illustrates how economic dependence can shape strategic calculations even where security interests diverge.
Likewise, Australia and New Zealand’s dependence on China as a top export market for minerals and agricultural produce gives China a possible lever of influence over the former.
In response to that, Japan’s frigate marketing may aim to fuse the economic and defense spheres into a holistic package to counter China’s growing naval might and economic clout in the Indo-Pacific.
That approach could also address a disconnect between military planners and politicians. While military planners think in terms of addressing security challenges, politicians tend to think in terms of elections, which course of action would win them popular support for subsequent terms.
By combining military capabilities and economic benefits into a single package, Japan’s frigate sales may generate sufficient buy-in from both defense planners and politicians in its potential customers.
However, the long-term success of Japan’s frigate marketing push may depend on its partners’ abilities to build the policy, institutional, and governance ecosystem that enables the absorption of downstream economic benefits.
These downstream benefits may include jobs, the strengthening of local shipbuilding and repair industries and the fostering of education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, in which Japan could be a key partner.
Successfully harnessing these downstream benefits could incentivize politicians to pursue further defense and economic cooperation with Japan, avoiding one-off purchases and expanding cooperation into related fields beyond defense.
Ultimately, the real test of Japan’s emerging regional influence will not be how many frigates it sells, but whether it can transform defense transactions into durable networks of economic, industrial and political alignment.
In an Indo-Pacific region increasingly shaped by strategic competition and uncertain guarantees, the countries that can fuse security, technology and prosperity into a single ecosystem will set the terms of the next regional order.
