The Japanese government, recently, has come under tremendous pressure from the opposition to scale back its naval assistance to US warships involved in Afghan ground missions. Even the public opinion is heavily divided on the issue. In a recent newspaper poll, 39% of around 2000 respondents support the mission while 44% oppose it. Now the Japanese parliament would debate the issue which many believe is a clear sign that the current pro-US government under prime minister Yasuo Fakuda is facing a mounting opposition challenge on its foreign policy.
The opposition, Democratic Party of Japan(DPJ) believes that the naval mission to Afghanistan is unconstitutional given that the coalition military operations did not receive the approval of the United Nations. The opposition pressure has certainly increased two-fold on the Japanese government after the DPJ won elections to control the upper house of the Japanese parliament.
It is very surprising to see that the Japanese opposing an American mission. Since the second world war, the United States has meant so much politically, economically and ofcourse militarily to the tiny Pacific island-nation. Around 50,000 American troops are based in various Japanese islands to provide a security buffer for the country against the potentially imperialistic attitudes of Russia and China. But ordinary Japanese people, since the Iraq invasion, believe that their country has been unnecessarily involved in a war that is illegal and not their own. As a result the opposition wants the government to scrap the navy’s Afghan mission because allege that the oil supplied by Japanese ships is being illegally diverted to the war in Iraq.
Furthermore the Japanese believe that Tokyo’s support of the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan would make the country and its citizens susceptible to future terrorist attacks. Many Japanese aid workers are involved in humanitarian assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan and they would be vulnerable to kidnappings and murders due to military assistance provided to the US.
Coming to domestic Japanese politics, the opposition is piling pressure on every major decision(local or foreign) taken by the government. Many analysts believe that the tough opposition attitude has resulted from a comment made by a previous cabinet minister of the ruling party, who seemed to publicly endorse the US atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrifying his fellow Japanese people.
The US is certainly agitated with a potential Japanese scrapping of naval assistance to its forces as this would mean Washington would be deprived of the technological advancement of Tokyo’s operations. The most important factor that is making the Americans nervous is the growing list of allied withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq which is in turn increasing the prospect of Washington fighting these two critical wars alone.
Link: Al Jazeera
