Asian alarm at Japan mission

Japan's controversial new peace role

Japan's first post-World War II troop deployment to a combat zone this week has sent a ripple of concern through Chinese and North Korean media.

Elsewhere, Asian media took the news in their stride.

China Youth Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Youth League, criticised Japan's involvement, saying it could set the country on a new quest for modern military power.

"Although we cannot yet claim that Japan's troop dispatch to Iraq will inevitably take it back to its previous militaristic path, this large-scale military action has fundamentally undermined the Peace Constitution and pushed Japan a large step forward towards becoming a major military power," it said.

Japan has legislated to allow the troop dispatch, but the country's pacifist post-war constitution sets limits on the military's activities.

"It could also stimulate Japan's new generation and hawkish politicians' greed for power, and compel them to go back to their past paths," the daily added.

Alarm bells

The paper accused Tokyo of "trying to establish Japan's international status as a major political and military power and rebuild the Japanese nation's past glories". It said a build-up of Japanese military strength would ultimately benefit US interests in the region.

Over the last few weeks, as Japan has prepared for the Iraq mission, Chinese media have sounded the alarm bell on several occasions. The mass-circulation People's Daily said this month that the troop deployment suggested military ambitions.

Parts of China were occupied by Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s.

In North Korea, Pyongyang radio said that "all parts of Japan protested strongly" against the authorities' "manoeuvre" to send large-scale forces to Iraq.

The ruling party newspaper Nodong Sinmun said talk in Tokyo of a revamp of Japan's defence posture if the Iraq deployment is a success "reveals the aggressive nature of Japan turning to the right and heading for its militarization".

'Plan for war'

The North Korean state news agency KCNA quoted Nodong Sinmun as saying that plans by Japan to boost participation in UN missions overseas were "nothing but a plan for overseas attack and war".

Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it until 1945.

"The US is now escalating its war of aggression worldwide under the pretext of the 'war on terrorism' and urging Japan to render active military support to it," KCNA said.

"Japan is taking this situation as a golden opportunity for revising the article in the present constitution which bans war and going in for overseas aggression without hindrance," it added.

Criticism 'churlish'

South Korea's media has paid little attention to Japan's Iraq troop deployment. Seoul itself has decided to send 3,000 troops to Iraq in April to augment the 675 already working there.

In Singapore, occupied by Japan from 1942-45, the Straits Times newspaper said it was "churlish and short-sighted" to argue that the troop deployment was a sign of rising militarism; rather, Japan could help create a secure and stable Iraq.

"For the sake of Iraq, political stability in the Middle East, the security of oil supplies and the cut-no-corners war on terror, Japan and other countries must persevere with the hard work of bringing Iraq back to normal," it said.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.