Concerns over North Korea’s missile development efforts and suspected nuclear weapons program have increased Japanese interest in developing a missile defense system, Japanese officials and analysts have said, according to today’s New York Times (see GSN, Nov. 8).

“The impact of the news from North Korea has been strong,” Masashi Nishihara, president of the National Defense Academy, Japan’s interservice military college, said Friday.  “North Korea has reversed its positions.  That justifies us to move forward to develop missile defense and to eventually deploy it,” Nishihara added.

Japan has already been researching missile defense technologies that the United States hopes to put to use in 2008, the Times reported.  Because of concerns over possibly antagonizing China, however, Japanese officials had planned to delay deciding until 2004 whether to join the United States in field trials.

Shigeru Ishiba, head of the Japanese Defense Agency, has urged that Japan increase its missile defense efforts with the United States.

“We should exert efforts to get the program to leave the research phase as soon as possible,” Ishiba told a Japanese Parliament committee last week.

The Japanese media has reported that the United States has begun to deploy missile surveillance units in Japan and that Washington is expected to pressure Tokyo into developing a missile defense system, the Times reported.

U.S. Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith, however, said that Japan does not need to be pressured.

“You don’t have to pressure Japan for Japanese to realize that Japan is facing a serious threat of missile attack,” Feith said.  “There are missile arcs that one could draw that clearly cover Japan.  That’s what makes the missile threat very serious,” he added (James Brooke, New York Times, Nov. 11).

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