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Besides the immediate prompt given by the North Koreans, I think Japan's remilitarization was inevitable simply on demographic and cultural grounds.
The generation who were adults during the last world war and reconstruction are now almost all dead. The cultural effects of the war on the Japanese people as a whole were bound to wear away with their passing.
I believe a similar phenomenon will eventually occur in the West, as the generations who lived through Cold War die off. As a result, the cultural taboo associated with nuclear weapons will subside, resulting in a more aggressive power-politics than those generations would have been inclined to pursue.
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