As Japan passed security legislation in fall 2015, many headlines proclaimed that Japan was “abandoning pacifism.” This conventional wisdom gets two things wrong: it exaggerates the extent to which Japan was actually pacifist in the past, and exaggerates the magnitude of Japan’s new policies. My new CATO Institute paper, “Japan’s Security Evolution” argues that Japan abandoned pacifism in the 1950s, and since then has pursued a strategy of buck-passing to the United States. Recent legislation reflects a continuation (not a change) in Japan’s postwar national security policy.