Japan's position in Asia has changed significantly since the end of the Cold War. The most important logistics base for the U.S. then, Japan now finds itself at the forefront of the U.S.-China rivalry, with far less resources at its disposal than it used to have.
While Japan's military spending was more than twice China's at the end of the Cold War, Chinese military spending is now more than five times larger than Japan's. Even though Japan has the third largest economy in the world, China's economy is now two-and-a-half times larger than Japan's.
