TOKYO: Japan plans to spend an extra $2.1 billion on missiles, fighter jets and helicopters, an official said on Wednesday, as Tokyo looks to boost defense capabilities with concerns growing over a rising China.

The cash injection over the next few months comes on top of regular military spending for 2012 to 2013 and is separate from a request for an increase in the budget for the next fiscal year that policymakers called for on Tuesday.

Japan is involved in a territorial tussle with China over a group of uninhabited islands and nerves have been rattled by an unpredictable North Korea, which sent a rocket over Japan’s southern islands last month.

“We will request 180.5 billion yen to be allocated to military spending from a stimulus package,” a defense ministry spokesman said, adding that some of the money would be used to buy PAC-3 surface-to-air anti-ballistic missile systems and to modernize four F-15 fighter jets.

The request for funds has to be approved by the finance ministry before being officially included in the stimulus the government is set to announce later this month, reportedly worth 13.1 trillion yen for this fiscal year to March.

The announcement came a day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party said Japan will increase military spending for the first time in 11 years in the next fiscal year starting from April.

Confrontations with China have become commonplace since Tokyo nationalized part of the chain in September, a move it insists amounted to nothing more than a change of ownership of what was already Japanese territory.

But Beijing reacted with fury, with observers saying the riots that erupted across China in the following weeks must have had at least tacit government backing.