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North Korea slams Japan’s ‘reckless’ ambition to become major military power
Pyongyang calls Tokyo’s defence white paper ‘a war scenario for realising its ambition for reinvasion from A to Z’
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A new Japanese defence policy white paper showed the country was seeking to be a major military power, North Korean state media reported a foreign ministry official as saying on Friday, who justified Pyongyang’s nuclear programme on that basis.
The policy section chief of the Institute for Japan Studies under the foreign ministry described the Japanese defence white paper, approved this week, as “a war scenario for realising its ambition for reinvasion from A to Z,” the Korean Central News Agency said.
The white paper was approved by the cabinet of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Tuesday.
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It argued, among other things, that China’s intensifying military activities could seriously impact Japanese security, citing the first confirmed incursion by a Chinese military aircraft into its airspace.
It also said North Korea’s activities pose a “more grave and imminent threat to Japan’s national security than ever before”.
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Japan is in a multi-year process of increasing its defence spending, as many countries are doing under pressure from the United States, as President Donald Trump governs for a second time with a focus on more-burden sharing on defence.
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