To those who are Japanese... troop deployment?

For our Japanese speaking/residing friends out there, what do you think about your military helping out in Iraq? Public opinion in Japan is split about 50/50.

What do you think? I say, I'm happy that you guys have a progressive PM, and are up to helping out after WWII...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=13&u=/nm/20040119/ts_nm/iraq_japanese_dc_4

i am not an expert on japanese politics, not by a long shot... and i am not japanese so i dont have the right to vote/influence the political process....

but i think its nice that the japanese govt finally committed themselves to some sort of "real" action.

whether or not the whole iraq thing should be happening or not is another story..

I like Japan's pacifism more than anything else. I also love how, as I understand it, this cannot be changed unless something like 2/3 of the public decide to change it.

Part of the reason they are sending troops, IMO, is 2 fold. 1) They got railed during the last Iraq stint for only donating money (though they donated quite a bit if memory serves me correctly). and 2) North Korea. They want to do everything thing they can to keep the US on their side. Not that the US would say "NK attacked you, you didn't send troops to Iraq so fuck you," but I think it's give and take and the Japanese want to keep the US as a good friend.

Just my $.02 on all this.

first of all,i study japanology at the universty of leuven (belgium).and altough I'm in my first year I have an exam of japanese modern history next wednesday .You must know that the Japanes constitution states that they can never have an army again.This was decided by the Allies after WWII but when china became a communist state and Korea was war torn between pro west and commies .The USA wanted to see this changed,the Japanese where stubborn about this .In the end the got a compromise and Japan got a Defence force,the first time since WW2 that japanse troops left it's homeland was in 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan ( I believe it were just some support ships...).So you can understand that this is quite a controversial topic in Japan.
Now leave me alone because I have kanji exam tomorrow

Well, anyway, koizumi has been reelected not long ago with a big majority, he can do whatever he wants...

it s a good move to keep good relations with USA, but if Al Qaeda really strikes japan then koizumi is dead politically i think. A lot of japanese older people don t want to be active in any war situation anymore, remembering the casualities they suffered in WWII, and of course the occupation -and that bitters considering japanese pride-.

About NK, if you remember Beezle in december 2k1, when they discovered a NK submarine in their seas, it was treated so seriously that you could have believed that in the next hour there would be war. I was watching TV Tokyo (or NHK i don t remember) in the morning -after yakyuu reviews and wrestling- and i wondered what was happening ^^
anyway i think it s good for them to keep USA in good terms with japan... it helps north korea to keep distance.

irak is plain chaos for now, the preparation for installing a new government to avoid anarchy has not been done properly before the operations in my opinion. It s funny how people can forget any religion in chaos, they steal, kill, and such.

ho~ well~ i just hope nothing bad will happen in japan.
a good thing there though, it s verry easy to distinguish an integrist from pakistan in japan, so land attack would be difficult to acchieve for them.

One thing to remember barfhappy, is that Al-Qaeda try to also recruit "local" people for their bombings and what have you. So it may be easy to tell a person of Arab descent from a Japanese person, but if they are buying off homelanders, then there's no distinguishing. I honestly hope nothing like that ever happens to Japan, especially considering how pacifistic they are. It'd be nice to think it would never happen anywhere else as well, but we all know that won't happen.

Like I said though, even if Japan didn't send "troops" to Iraq, I doubt the US would ever forsake them if they were attacked. Be it because we bombed them and feel responsible, be it out of international duty or be it out of a real friendship, the US will help Japan.

Gotta save the Anime!

BarfHappy said:

Well, anyway, koizumi has been reelected not long ago with a big majority, he can do whatever he wants...

Click to expand...

Yeah, big majorities DO suck. In Spain the Tories won the last elections with a big majority due to the weakness and disorganization of its oponents. When the Irak conflict began, the president Aznar gave full support to Bush in the invasion (as you'll probably know), and despite of having public opinion against this (there were incredibly HUGE popular demonstrations against it) and ALL the rest of political groups against, nothing could be made to stop it. So spanish troups and funds (the little we have) have been sent to Irak, and our political relations with many of our European neightbours are fucked up.

In the meanwhile, our (hopefully not for long)president is happy being "friend" of Bush while our own big problem, spanish terrorism, keeps unresolved causing new victims every day.

[OCEAN]