Japan Sounds Alarm On “Unprecedented, Critical And Imminent” Threat From North Korea

Monday, October 23, 2017
By Paul Martin

by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Oct 23, 2017

Following the landslide victory by Prime Minister Abe in Japan’s Sunday elections, which left his ruling coalition with a supermajority allowing him to change Japan’s constitution, Abe wasted no time in signalling a push towards his long-held goal of revising Japan’s post-war, pacifist constitution, however as Reuters reported earlier, Abe would “need to convince a divided public to succeed.” Parties in favor of amending the U.S.-drafted charter won nearly 80% of the seats in Sunday’s lower house election, leaving the small, new Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) as the biggest group opposed to Abe’s proposed changes. Still, Abe claimed he wanted to get other parties on board, including Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s new conservative Party of Hope, and was not insisting on a target of changing the constitution by 2020 that he floated this year.

Yet, despite Abe’s soothing vision, just one day after the election Japan was already setting the groundwork for creating the strawman that would be needed to get public support largely behind Abe’s militant venture.

As a result, Japan’s defense minister said on Monday that North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities have grown to an “unprecedented, critical and imminent” level, requiring “different responses” to the threat.

The minister, Itsunori Odonera, was quoted by AP as saying that this rising threat compels his country to endorse the U.S. view that “all options” must be considered, which President Donald Trump says includes possible military action. And since this pivot would require a revised constitution, the next step is already in play.

Odonera’s comments came at the outset of a so-called trilateral meeting in the Philippines (where over the weekend Russia was “delivering” weapons to the Duterte regime, as reported overnight) with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and South Korea’s defense minister, Song Young-moo. Each made statements about North Korea before a group of reporters and news cameras, but none took questions according to AP.

Mattis was in the Philippines to attend portions of a two-day meeting of defense ministers from the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations. He used the occasion to hold a three-way meeting with his counterparts from Japan and South Korea. He is scheduled later in the week to travel to Seoul to attend annual consultative talks with the South Korean government, which is expected to focus mostly on North Korea.

Elevating the North Korea bogeyman to unprecedented levels, and assuring that “no crisis will go to waste”, Odonera said North Korea’s most recent underground nuclear test could have been a hydrogen bomb, which is vastly more powerful than an atomic bomb.

“The country has steadfastly improved it nuclear and missiles capability,” said Onodera. He added: “The threat posed by North Korea has grown to the unprecedented, critical and imminent level.”

“Therefore, we have to take calibrated and different responses to meet that level of threat,” he said, without elaborating on what “different” responses Japan favors.

The Rest…HERE

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