Fresh-faced soldiers in crisp camouflage and new black boots eagerly bounded onto towering blocks of hard snow. Armed with shovels and sculpting tools, they were deploying on one of the trademark missions for Japanese troops — carving statues for the annual Sapporo Snow Festival.
Under the gaze of superior officers, a squadron of field artillery specialists chipped away at a Manhattan skyline magically taking shape behind a mammoth bust of New York Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui. A few strides away, members of the Self-Defense Forces' 11th Division etched a 40-foot-high scene from Peach Boy Railroad, a video game. These were just a few of the dazzling works created by 23,000 troops for the festival's 2 million visitors.
In a nation with a constitution that renounces war, the sculpture mission reinforces the affable image of what is essentially a pacifist military. But today Japan is in the midst of a historic deployment of roughly 1,000 troops to Iraq, including many of the men who once carved similarly glistening shapes here.
On Sunday, about 80 Japanese troops crossed the border from Kuwait into southern Iraq in a convoy of 25 jeeps, trucks and armored vehicles flying white-and-red Japanese flags, news services reported. They arrived in the town of Samawah following the earlier arrival of an advance party.
The dispatch of soldiers to Iraq has jarred the national psyche. No Japanese soldier has fallen — or killed an enemy — since the surrender to the United States in 1945. Pacifism has run deep here since the Imperial Army led 2 million soldiers to their deaths in World War II and the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to the end of the conflict. So, today, many Japanese are deeply torn, even tormented, about the military's new postwar role.
There are concerns over whether the Self-Defense Forces are suitable for a place as dangerous as Iraq. The troops, though backed by the world's fourth-largest military budget, are so new to hot spots that those soldiers chosen for Iraq duty required special training on matters as basic as how to handle their guns. Furthermore, their strict rules of engagement do not allow them to fire unless it is clearly necessary for self-defense. That calculation, many fret, may cause soldiers to pause for a fatal split second.
"The pressure is tremendous for the men of the SDF," said Yoshinobu Okubo, editor of the Tokyo monthly magazine Military Study. "This operation is a totally different level of danger for them. ... Their training with live ammunition is very limited. Just about once a year, the ground forces ... freely train with live ammunition in a realistic situation. Their training zone is small and limited, and done all in an extremely prescribed way. You can fire only from certain angles, for instance, to avoid accidents with civilians."
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has stated that the Japanese troops in Iraq will carry out only such noncombat duties as distributing water and transporting supplies.
"You are not going to Iraq for war, nor to exercise force, nor to be engaged in combat, but instead to help the people of Iraq reconstruct their country," he told troops who were preparing to depart last week.
So far, about 270 troops have been sent to the Persian Gulf region, and another 740 are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, with their mission scheduled to last at least one year. Japan is also deploying C-130 transport planes, armored vehicles, and two high-tech destroyers to the area.
Koizumi and other supporters of the deployment view the mission as a step on Japan's inevitable path to becoming a "normal nation," capable not only of defending itself but of playing a more active role in global conflicts. Japan, they say, is finally living up to the responsibilities of having the world's second-largest economy, with many envisioning a time when Tokyo stands side by side with Washington — its protector for half a century — sharing the burden of managing global trouble spots.
The Japanese were deeply stung by U.S. criticism following the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Tokyo had effectively purchased the safety of Japanese citizens by dispatching $13 billion instead of troops. Japan slowly began to alter its position, sending members of the Self-Defense Forces on limited engineering and technical missions to Cambodia, East Timor, Africa and the Golan Heights — always as part of U.N. peacekeeping forces.
Emboldened by Koizumi's success last year in winning approval for the Iraq mission in the legislature, the prime minister's ruling Liberal Democratic Party is moving ahead with plans to revise the constitution, drafted in 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities. In addition to renouncing war, the document states that "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained."
Lawmakers are pushing for changes that would allow the Self-Defense Forces to be called a military, which the constitution now prohibits, and grant the government far broader authority to dispatch soldiers overseas.
After years of debate, many believe the government has a good chance of winning such changes. Japan is already adding significantly to its military hardware without widespread opposition.
Facing a threat from North Korea, which fired a ballistic missile over Japan in 1998 and now claims to possess a "nuclear deterrent," Japan plans to double from four to eight its fleet of modern, Aegis-equipped destroyers. The government is also buying new aerial refueling planes capable of extending the reach of Japan's F-15 fighter jets to North Korea and back.
The Japanese are also buying aircraft-mounted, precision missile-guidance systems, similar to those used by the United States and Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Defense Agency put in a budget request to purchase an advanced PAC-3 anti-ballistic missile system from the United States. Last year, Japan launched its first two independent spy satellites.
"This year will be the one that takes our defense towards a new direction," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba told foreign journalists last month.
Some even see a rekindling of the old samurai spirit. "Befitting the nation of the way of the samurai, the SDF will accomplish our mission in a disciplined and dignified manner," Col. Koichiro Bansho, who is leading the Iraq mission, told the troops at a ceremony in Hokkaido last week.
Such statements cause discomfort among Japan's Asian neighbors, particularly those who suffered from Imperial Army atrocities during World War II. Koizumi is already under fire in the Koreas and China for his frequent visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese who died in military conflicts, including war criminals.
In making the case for the Iraq deployment, Koizumi has taken the argument beyond citing the need to honor the U.S.-Japanese alliance to invoke what he calls Japan's "national interest" in maintaining stability in the Middle East, given the nation's reliance on foreign oil. The quest for natural resources — which Japan largely lacks — was also a leading reason for the nation's military expansion in the early 20th century.
In a scathing editorial last week, North Korea's official news service said: "The aim sought by the troop dispatch is to build a framework for turning Japan into a military giant, militarizing it and securing a justification for overseas aggression."
In Iraq, Japanese scout teams have spent months combing the country, pinpointing the safest place to send troops, officials have said. They settled on Samawah, about 150 miles south of Baghdad, an area Koizumi has described as a "noncombat zone."
But analysts say that most Japanese appear to believe there are no safe places in Iraq and view the untried young troops as venturing into uncharted territory.
"I don't want to shoot anyone," Nobuo Magariyama, a young soldier training for Iraq duty, told Japan's NHK television network. "But if my fellow members and my life are at stake, then I will have to shoot. I feel that maybe we are living in a time where we have to shoot someone even if we don't want to."
The Iraq deployment is altering the very concept of the Self-Defense Forces, which was formed by U.S. occupation forces following World War II solely for the purpose of defending Japanese soil, and whose brochures still feature cute logos of the force's Defense Boy and Future Girl.
The Tiger Is Out
Nowhere are the changes felt more than here on the snowy northernmost island of Hokkaido, where the bulk of the Japanese troops being dispatched are based.
Civilian volunteers and subcontractors had to pitch in as never before this year to complete the Sapporo snow statues because 30 military vehicles once used for hauling snow — along with many soldiers who once served as sculptors — were diverted for Iraq-related training. The soldiers staying behind talk with reverence about their comrades.
"I volunteered to go, but I was not chosen," said Capt. Tetsuya Watanabe, 32, who was supervising work on the sculpture of the New York skyline. "Those who were chosen feel honored. I can understand why ... It is an honorable task they are doing in Iraq; I would be honored to serve my country there."
Such statements trouble Masamichi Misawa, 78, a World War II veteran and one of thousands of Sapporo residents opposed to the deployment.
"We believed blindly in [World War II], even killing ourselves through the divine wind of the kamikaze," said Misawa, an award-winning memoirist who was held prisoner for four years by the Soviets after his capture in 1945. "We follow too easily, question authority too little. We cannot allow ourselves to go abroad again with guns. I do not trust our society enough to hold back."
A peace organization in Hokkaido set up a telephone hot line in December so that the Self-Defense Forces troops and their families could share their fears.
The young wife of one soldier being dispatched called the hot line last month, saying she was haunted by images of her husband being forced to kill an Iraqi. "How would I welcome him home after such a deed?" she asked, according to Hideko Takahashi, secretary general of the Human Rights Telephone Bank.
About 65 miles north of Sapporo, the town of Asahikawa — the former site of the largest Imperial Army base in Japan and today a hub for the force's northern command — is festooned with yellow flags showing support for the troops. The town's Shrine of National Protection, a sprawling Shinto house of worship across from a military base, is being frequented by family and friends of Self-Defense Forces members.
Among dozens of traditional wooden prayer tablets are three to an outgoing soldier nicknamed "Little Ui."
"Come back soon so we can have barbeque and go camping again," begged his wife. "Daddy, please come back safe," wrote his young daughter. A friend promised the gods to stop drinking until Little Ui came home.
Opinion polls show that almost half the country now supports the mission — up from less than a quarter of the population only six months ago. Ret. Lt. Gen. Toshiyuki Shikata, former commanding general of Japan's northern forces on Hokkaido, said that is as it should be. "We will never again cross the lines that were crossed in the past," he said. "The tiger is out of its cage again, but only to do the obligation of the international community ... The role of the SDF is changing, but for the better."
Special correspondent Sachiko Sakamaki contributed to this report.
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