Japan Press Weekly

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2014 May 21 - 27 [POLITICS]

SDF should cancel landing drill aiming at fighting in wars abroad: JCP

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces plan to conduct an amphibious landing training exercise in the name of defending remote islands on an uninhabited island of the Amami Islands, Eniyabanare-jima, in Kagoshima Prefecture by the end of this week.

About 1,330 personnel of the Ground, Maritime, and Air Self-Defense Forces, including GSDF members trained to be assigned to a Japanese version of the U.S. Marine Corps, will take part in the exercise. In the exercise, these GSDF members will aim to regain control of an island from a foreign entity.

Kagoshima’s Setouchi Town, which has jurisdiction over Eniyabanare-jima, said that this is the first landing drill jointly conducted by all three SDF branches.

The drill is apparently a part of the government plan to increase Japan’s security presence in the Nansei Islands with an eye on China, Akahata pointed out.

The Japanese Communist Party Amami District Committee on May 18 took to the streets in the town to increase public awareness of the exercise. The JCP criticized the drill as targeting a change in the SDF to be an armed force fighting in wars abroad in close connection with the Abe government’s move to lift the ban on Japan’s use of the collective self-defense right.

JCP member of the Kagoshima Prefectural Assembly Matsuzaki Makoto on May 20 urged Governor Ito Yuichiro to request the SDF to cancel the plan.

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While local residents were holding a protest rally, SDF troops on the evening of May 23 returned to a ferry port in Setouchi Town after conducting an amphibious landing drill in Eniyabanare-jima.