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It comes as a surprise to learn that the Iraq dispatch accounts for a mere fraction of Japan’s massive military. As Asia Times points out, Japan has the world’s second or third most powerful military force and second-largest navy, and Japan's ground forces are 30 percent larger than British army.

Japan, an economic superpower, is becoming a serious player in world politics. At a time when the United States is engaging in a go-it-alone foreign policy and neighboring China is growing in economic and political influence, the Japanese have been more willing than at any time in the past to re-evaluate their own foreign policy. Norimitsu Onishi argues in the New York Times that though the Japanese have come to terms with the United States’ economic and military supremacy, they are less prepared to relinquish regional preeminence.

“[E]ven as Japanese have become less focused on competition and more on their quality of life, there is deep fear and ambivalence about becoming second class to the rising power next door [China]. It is, after all, a country that the Japanese had colonized a mere half a century ago.”

Excepting North Korea, which characterized the Iraq deployment as "a prelude to the overseas aggression of the Japanese militarists," there was no hostile commentary from Japan’s other neighbors. (This was a little surprising, since crimes committed by Japanese troops during WWII are part of living memory at least in China and South Korea.)

About half of the Japanese public is opposed to the DSP deployment, but opposition has been less vocal than many expected. As the Straits Times notes:

“[O]pposition politicians protested, but without much fervor, the dispatch of armed soldiers, contending that it violated Article 9 of the Constitution, which prohibits the use of armed force to settle disputes. About 4,000 protesters rallied in Tokyo with banners: 'We don't need a war.' In a land where demonstrations of tens of thousands have been fashioned, kabuki-style, into an art form, a protest of 4,000 is not worth the ink its takes to print this.”

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