"Japan is making profound changes, perhaps the most important shift in its attitude since World War II and it's very much in reaction to what is going on in the Northeast Asian region," said Balbina Hwang, analyst with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

For the first time, during ministerial talks in Washington this weekend, Japan joined the United States in voicing concerns -- on paper -- over China's increasing defense spending and tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

The two allies have for some time been sharing their concerns on Taiwan, at which China has directed 600 missiles, but unlike the United States, Japan had been reluctant to address the issue directly for fear of angering its giant neighbor.

It is slowly shifting away from six decades of pacificism and beginning to confront China, capitalizing largely on recent public boasts by North Korea that it possessed nuclear weapons, which posed a direct threat to Tokyo.

"It seems like the most obvious and most blatant reason is North Korea but in fact, it isn't North Korea. North Korea is the easy excuse and the most readily obvious but it's really about China," Hwang said.

Charles Pritchard, who served as chief US interlocutor with North Korea in the first term of the Bush administration, said the Japanese had used the global fight against terrorism to their advantage in moving forward their own agenda on security.

They had used North Korea "as a pretext for concerns about China," developing over the years a slow relationship with the United States in terms of missile defense to one that is far more mature now, he said.

Bush, a close friend of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, changed his predecessor Bill Clinton's style of being wary about Japan's role in Asia, stressing the need for Tokyo to be stronger and more independent.

This would, in fact, serve US and Japanese interests, particularly checking China's expansion as a regional military power fuelled by its robust economic growth, analysts say.

There is little doubt that China has been expanding its military arsenal at an unprecedented pace over the last two decades.

Japan's defence chief Yoshinori Ono was very vocal at a press conference at the end of the Washington talks on Saturday, singling out an intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine into the waters around Japan's southernmost islands last November.

"Also, Chinese military spending has been growing by more than 10 percent per annum over the past 16 years or so," Ono pointed out.

Beijings aggressive maritime strategy may create new political tensions in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, said Bernard Cole of the National Defense University in the United States.

Philip Saunders, from the same university, said China was likely to build a credible nuclear deterrent by 2010-2015 with different types of advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles.

This raises the stakes as the United States is obliged by law to offer Taiwan "a means of self-defense" if it is invaded by China.

"The ultimate size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal will hinge on US-China political relations, and the effectiveness of US missile defenses," Saunders said.

Some analysts say that the United States, by encouraging Japan to take on a higher military profile, would be wary in not upsetting China, the only power seen capable of reigning in a nuclear-armed North Korea.

But others believe the United States, in many ways, has been using North Korea as a weapon against China, essentially holding the prospect of a more powerful Japan.

"This is a way of subtly pressuring China that if it does not do something about North Korea, then in fact Japan will be encouraged to be more powerful," analyst Hwang said.

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