Japan comes out of the shadows

Etajima, the Officer Candidate School of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force, is a demanding military academy. Awakened by a bugle call at 6am, midshipmen throw on uniforms and race outside to line up and be corrected by "discipline officers".

Before they are commissioned as officers, midshipmen must swim - breaststroke - more than 12km in Etajima Bay. The gruelling nine-hour ordeal is broken only for lunch, when the swimmers are handed rice balls.

"We are trying to educate future leaders with the spirit of sea warriors," says Captain Taisei Tamai, the deputy superintendent of Etajima.

But when they leave for a five-month cruise after a year of training, the men and women of Etajima are not joining a real Navy - not quite.

Captain Tamai says he does not use the word "Navy". "It's always the Maritime Self-Defence Force. In Japan, Navy means great Imperial Navy. "There is," he says, "the important question of the constitution."

Indeed, Japan's Peace Constitution, which came into effect in 1947, expressly forbids the Japanese from having armed forces. Nonetheless, the Maritime Self-Defence Force - like its counterpart Ground and Air Self-Defence Forces created in the 1950s - is a significant power. With 50 destroyers and 16 submarines, it rates as the fourth most powerful Navy in the world after the American, British and Russian Navies.

Overall, Japan ranks among the top few countries in defence spending.

For years, the Japanese dealt with this apparent contradiction by not talking about it much, at least publicly. The Japanese Self-Defence Forces kept a low profile. Japanese troops were used mostly in natural disasters and accidents.

But in the early 1990s, Japan began sending the forces on peacekeeping missions abroad, to places such as Cambodia and Mozambique.

In 1993 North Korea test-launched its Nodong-1 missile (range 1000 to 1300km) into the Sea of Japan. The provocation forced Japan to regard the Pyongyang regime as a serious threat. Public opinion, traditionally antimilitarist, began to shift. Even Japan's Communist Party dropped its opposition to the Self-Defence Forces at a party congress in January.

The North Korean threat - together with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and China's build-up of its forces - is pushing Japan to face up to the thorny question of just how much of a military it really wants. AfterSeptember 11, Japan allowed the Maritime Self-Defence Force to send supply ships, escorted by warships, to fuel coalition ships in the Indian Ocean. The Government is now expanding the forces' role and pondering changes that will make them more like regular armed forces.

After the US invaded Iraq in March last year, Japan joined the US-led coalition, albeit in a modest role. The Japanese Diet voted to allow the forces to perform humanitarian assignments in Iraq, though only in so-called noncombat areas.Public opinion is split over the dispatch. In February a poll showed 48.3 per cent in support of the troop deployment and 45.1 per cent opposed. Asked if Japan should withdraw its forces if a soldier was killed or wounded, 54 per cent said yes.

In March, Japan set up a 300-strong "special operations group", a counter-terror force with the ninja fighting skills used by the US Delta Force and British SAS commandos.

This month the Japanese Defence Agency issued a white paper urging the transformation of the forces into a "more functional force" to cope with the new threats. The paper warned that Pyongyang was likely to increase the range of its missiles.