Two Japanese hostages freed in Iraq returned home yesterday and Tokyo insisted it would not follow Spain's example and withdraw its troops from Iraq.
"The fact that Spain made that decision and started preparing to withdraw its troops will not change our country's policy," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba said.
Tokyo's handling of two separate incidents of Japanese civilians being taken hostage in Iraq earned public approval.
But Japan, a close ally of the US, remains divided over the deployment of its troops in Iraq on a non-combat mission to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Japan has around 550 ground troops in Samawa, southern Iraq, in its riskiest military venture since World War II.
Japan's top government spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, stressed yesterday that the deployment of the troops to Iraq was not connected with the US-led war.
"Humanitarian and reconstruction activities conducted by the Self-Defense Forces [military] do not assist the US combat action," Fukuda told parliament.
Japan had been on tenterhooks earlier this month when an armed group took three Japanese civilians hostage and threatened to kill them if Tokyo did not withdraw its troops from Iraq.
The three were released on Wednesday last week after being held captive near Baghdad for a week.
In a separate incident, two Japanese civilians were seized by a militant group in Iraq last week. The two men -- Jumpei Yasuda, 30, a freelance journalist, and Nobutaka Watanabe, 36, a former member of the Japanese military -- were freed on Saturday and arrived home yesterday.
The two men were critical of Japan's decision to support the US in Iraq and send its troops to the war-ravaged country.
"It is our job to monitor the facts about the battlefield in Iraq and the war Japan has supported," Watanabe said shortly after returning home.
He said he had no plans to go to Iraq again in the foreseeable future as the situation there was dangerous.
In line with Japan's pacifist constitution, the law enabling the reconstruction mission in Samawa limits the troops' activities to "non-combat zones," a concept that critics have charged from the start was meaningless in Iraq.
A survey by major daily Yomiuri Shimbun at the weekend and published yesterday said about three in four Japanese viewed the government's handling of both hostage incidents positively.
It also showed 60 percent of the respondents view the dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq positively, a rise from 53 percent in January.
The releases of the hostages were a boon for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a staunch backer of the US. The incidents represented his biggest political challenge since he took office.
The Yomiuri poll showed public support for Koizumi's Cabinet up 6.9 points from a month earlier at 59.2 percent.
Spain's new prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, said on Sunday that Madrid would pull out its 1,400 troops from Iraq as soon as possible.
In a further blow to US President George W. Bush, Honduras followed Spain on Monday in announcing it will pull its troops out of the country.
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