Edited sentence: For a long period, the effectiveness of the Japan Ground Self Defence Force to hold off a Soviet invasion of Hokkaido was in doubt, as Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in 1972 that it seemed optimised to fight ‘a Soviet invasion conducted on American patterns of a quarter of a century ago.’ While the force is now an efficient army of 148,000, its apparent importance has declined with the end of the Cold War, and attempts to reorient the forces as a whole to new post Cold War missions have been tangled in a series of internal political disputes