Prime Minister Kan Wants to Send Japanese Military Force to Korea
The headline and the picture at the top of this post are exaggerations, but Prime Minister Kan must be clueless if he thought it would be appropriate to make this kind of public remark:
Speaking with family members of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, “We must consider ways to rescue Japanese abductees in North in case of an emergency situation.” He added there are no rules on the dispatch of the Self Defense Forces for such rescue operations but he would “like to seek a Japan-South Korea agreement to allow the SDF to be involved in an emergency.” Kan added discussions “are ongoing.”
Kan later explained his intent was to see whether South Korea “could accept” Japanese military transport aircraft and other means “and that this needs to be thought about.” The Japanese media took a critical approach, saying the dispatch of troops would be against Article 9 of the Constitution and the military law, which prohibit the use of force, and the chances of it happening are scant. South Korean government officials said Kan’s comments were “totally unexpected” and there has been no previous discussion.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku has tried to conduct some damage control by vehemently denying that any such plans were being considered.
Here’s a quote from a Korea Times opinion piece that provides a great example of the kind of paranoia that Kan’s comment has reinforced:
Things will not calm down so easily, however, if his remarks prove to be a “premeditated gaffe,” as many Koreans suspect.
Even if the Japanese leader’s speech was aimed at pleasing ultra-rightist voters, it can hardly avoid criticism for being rash, dangerous and brazen-faced ― totally inappropriate in a word.
Kan was rash, as he made such utterances even before he sounded out the intention of his Korean counterparts. The remark is also dangerous, as it could exaggerate ― actually aggravate ― tension on the peninsula. Most of all, the comment was brazen-faced because the SDF’s activities here might not be limited to the rescue of the Japanese nationals, and it came at none other time than the centenary of Japan’s forced annexation of Korea.
What most Koreans see behind Kan’s statement is the specter of Japan’s rearmament under the pretext of yet-to-be realized threats from China and North Korea. Tokyo’s defense budget of $51.4 billion last year was the world’s fourth largest, following the United States, France and Britain. The 155,000-strong SDF, all consists of officers, can turn into 1.5 million-strong armed forces in no time. Scientists agree it has always been a matter of time before Tokyo becomes a nuclear power if it wants.
As you can see, paranoia is rarely based on a rational evaluation of actual evidence. Japan’s defense budget is actually the 6th or 7th largest, not the 4th (the KT has conveniently forgotten to include China and Russia in its ranking). When the author writes that Japan’s SDF “all consists of officers,” he or she either doesn’t know what the word “officer” means, or is straight out lying. The concern about the force strength of Japan’s military is also rather silly, considering the fact that South Korea has a military with over 600,000 active duty personnel and about 8 million reservists. And, as the Korea Times noted in an article earlier this year, “South Korea, like Japan, has the technology to build a nuclear arsenal quickly if it decides to do so.”
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