Bringing Up The Rear : An embarrassed Japan tries to join the fight.(Brief Article)

To this day Japan remembers the allied victory during the gulf war as a national humiliation. Hamstrung by public opinion and its American-imposed "peace constitution," the country's Self-Defense Forces couldn't join the military campaign that in 1991 liberated Kuwait. Instead, Tokyo helped bankroll the operation, donating $13 billion of the $61 billion it took to achieve Iraq's defeat. Japan's failure to dispatch troops "put us in the same category as Iran, Jordan and Syria [countries that opposed the allied campaign]," says security expert Yukio Okamoto, a former Foreign Ministry official. "The U.S. didn't even invite us to the victory parade."

Ten years later that slight could help provoke the farthest-reaching change in Japan's military stance since the end of World War II. Just days after hijackers commandeered airliners and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi proposed sending Japanese forces to aid the American- led retaliation. His plan, submitted for parliamentary approval last Friday, would in effect authorize the largest Japanese military deployment in 50 years-- and break a taboo that has underpinned Asian security calculations for much of that time. International opinion is driving the agenda. "If we say 'No, we can't do this and that' at a time when everyone is gearing up to crush terrorism," Koizumi told Parliament last week, "Japan will never get respect in the international community."

Proponents insist prestige isn't the issue. "We are talking not of interests but of obligations," says Okamoto, who on Sept. 20 became a special adviser to Koizumi's cabinet. "Image plays a small part in what we are doing." But in fact, Koizumi has seized upon the current crisis to bolster Japan's reputation abroad, which has been flagging along with the country's once mighty economy. His major obstacle: Article 9 of the Constitution, which states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right and the threat of use of force as a means of settling international disputes." If approved by the Diet, Koizumi's draft legislation would enable the SDF to provide logistical, medical and humanitarian support to the U.S.-led coalition, but only for the next two years, in "noncombat" areas and with the permission of host nations.

Warships would be allowed to ferry materiel, including guns and bullets, to U.S. forces deployed in the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf. Army medical teams could staff field hospitals near the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. Air Force and other SDF units could be deployed in refugee camps or sent on search-and- rescue missions for missing American fighters. Although missions would avoid defined combat zones, ...