Japan to rebuild military to offset China, N Korea

WASHINGTON, Aug 3: Amid growing fears of United States’ willingness to defend Japan in a showdown with increasingly militaristic China or North Korea, Tokyo is shedding its pacifist constitution and rebuilding its military arsenal, reports said.

“China’s growing might and uncertainties about the reliability of the US in the region are causing Japan to begin edging away from its insistence on an impotent military,” The Washington Post said in a despatch from Tokyo.

Japan’s ruling liberal party lawmaker Shingo Nashimura told the Post, “Tokyo must be like NATO powers. We must have the military power and the legal authority to act on it. We ought to have aircraft carriers, long-range missiles, bombers and even the atomic bomb”.