There is much talk lately about the rising level of defense interest in Japan. So far as I know, there is no country in the world over the size of 200,000 that does not have something in the nature of an armed force. At the extreme we have the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and perhaps China. The range is from wide-scale, virtually all-spectrum military capacity to extremely limited capacity. Japan lies very much at the lower end of the scale: very limited in terms of possible missions, in terms of its own security doctrine, in terms of what domestic public opinion would permit, and in terms of Japan's perception of its position in the world.