Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has instructed his defense and finance ministers to hike the country’s defense spending by more than 50% over five years to around ¥43 trillion ($315 billion) — signaling yet another dramatic shift for the pacifist country.

Kishida’s instructions were the latest in a drip of information about how Japan intends to push forward with an ambitious plan to bolster its defenses and work even more closely with the United States and others. The move comes as Tokyo attempts to meet the challenge presented by China amid fears of a Taiwan emergency and the growing missile threat from nuclear-armed North Korea.

Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said late Monday that the prime minister had conveyed the instructions to him and Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki after talks about the defense budget, with the amount to be set under the country’s midterm buildup plan, which is currently being revised.

The figure would dwarf the roughly ¥27.47 trillion in spending under the current five-year plan, which runs through the fiscal year beginning April 2023. It would also put Japan closer to the target Kishida ordered last week of spending 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense by 2027.

To reach the 2% target — a move that would put Japan on par with NATO’s defense spending standard — the Defense Ministry had said roughly ¥48 trillion would be needed over the next five years. On the other hand, the more fiscally conservative Finance Ministry had sought to keep the budget to around ¥30 trillion to ¥35 trillion.

Speaking after his meeting with Kishida and Suzuki, defense chief Hamada praised Kishida's order, saying it would allow his ministry to move forward with its plans to beef up the country’s defenses.

“We believe that this is the level at which we can achieve a fundamental strengthening of our defense capabilities,” Hamada said after the meeting.

Japan has long maintained an informal cap on defense spending of around 1% of GDP as part of its exclusively defense-oriented security policy under the pacifist Constitution, with the fiscal 2022 defense budget coming in at ¥5.4 trillion, or around 1% of GDP, excluding supplementary funding.

The Defense Ministry is seeking ¥5.59 trillion in spending for the next fiscal year, a figure that is highly likely to balloon as unspecified projects get price tags.

Kishida has repeatedly reiterated his pledge to “fundamentally reinforce” the country’s defense capabilities amid an “increasingly severe security environment," and experts called prime minister's latest move a clear signal that the government is ready to break some of shackles that have constrained Japan since the end of World War II.

"It's another pretty clear signal from Japan's top political leaders that they're serious about bolstering the country's defense when they talk about the severity of the regional strategic environment in which they see Japan sitting for the next five, 10, 20 years," said Tom Corben, a research fellow in the foreign policy and defense program at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Center.

There is growing public support for increased spending, particularly after China’s large-scale military exercises near Taiwan saw it send five ballistic missiles into waters near Japan’s far-flung southwestern islands in Okinawa Prefecture for the first time.

Some analysts have said the Chinese missile launches were likely intended as a message to Japan to stay out of any potential conflict over democratic Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a renegade province that must be united with the mainland, by force if necessary.

Chunks of the planned defense budget are expected to go toward building up a "counterstrike capability," allowing Japan to hit enemy bases with missiles that, proponents say, would lend Tokyo a powerful deterrent to Chinese assertiveness and North Korean nuclear saber-rattling. The ruling bloc on Friday agreed on the need to acquire the capability.

Still, while there has been a surge in support this year for beefing up Japan’s defenses, the approval rate for the prime minister has remained perilously low in recent months, and Kishida and his team will still need to determine sources for funding the budget hike — a discussion that could further raise the ire of the public if it involves increasing taxes.

A poll released Monday by the Yomiuri Shimbun found that while 51% of respondents supported boosting spending over the ¥40 trillion threshold, 38% of those who backed the idea said the main source of funding should come from government bonds, while 27% said it should be through taxes.

Just ahead of Kishida’s meeting with his defense and finance chiefs Monday, he also held talks with Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of Komeito, the ruling bloc’s junior partner. The two sides were expected to hold further “high-level” talks on financing the defense hike in order to “prevent an excessive financial burden on the public,” Yamaguchi said. Those talks were reportedly set to be held Wednesday.

An expert panel advising Kishida has called for spending reforms and a broad-based source of tax revenue to cover the defense costs, though it did not recommend specific measures. The head of Kishida's ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s tax panel, however, has said that raising corporate and household income taxes in the next fiscal year cannot be ruled out.

Other heavyweights in the LDP, including Policy Research Council Chairman Koichi Hagiuda, have poured cold water on talk of a tax hike, calling instead for the budget to initially be financed by government bonds and a reduction in spending in other areas.

"I believe that we have no choice but to use government bonds for the next two years" to finance the increase, Hagiuda said in a speech last week.

The powerful LDP policy research council chief also warned Tuesday that a focus on taxes to cover the expenditure could harm the party's electability.

"It's a big negative to send out the wrong message before (next April's unified) local elections that everything will be paid for by taxes or that taxes will be raised next year," Hagiuda was quoted as saying.

For now, it appears that the government will put off any specific tax hike when it compiles its initial budget for fiscal 2023 later this month, while continuing to discuss ways to secure a stable source of revenue for the defense hike.

Nevertheless, Corben cautioned that while the focus may now be shifting to specific funding sources, those resources "won't necessarily arrive all at once."

"They're going to arrive in stages, and that's going to determine how quickly Japan can move on specific initiatives that fall under the broader defense modernization or expansion push," he said.

Kishida's latest spending instructions come as defense issues look likely to take up a large portion of his administration’s bandwidth for the remainder of the month.

In addition to revisions to the country’s midterm defense buildup plan, the government is also expected to update two other key defense and diplomatic documents, including its National Security Strategy for the first time since its creation in 2013.