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Taiwan Quick Take: Arms delay worries Tokyo

Japanese government officials found it difficult to understand why Taiwan's legislature had failed to pass the special arms budget and said the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) should be blamed, an official with the legislature said on condition of anonymity yesterday. Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), who left for Japan on a visit last Wednesday, returned yesterday. The official said that it seemed that Japanese officials had an even stronger reaction to Taiwan's long-stalled arms package than US officials. "They told us that it's unbelievable that Taiwan has delayed the review of the arms bill for about two years, and they thought the KMT should take the blame," he said. The legislative official said that KMT spokesperson Cheng Li-wen's (鄭麗文) article published in the Chinese-language China Times' on July 6 had increased concerns in Japan. Cheng wrote that she had doubts about the necessity of Taiwan joining the "US-Japan Alliance" and implied that the arms bill was a kind of cross-strait arms competition. This caused concern among Japanese officials that Taiwan had no intention of enhancing its defense capability and they asked whether that was the KMT's position, the official said.

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