US President Donald Trump marked the 60th anniversary of the signing of the security treaty between the US and Japan with a call for a stronger and deeper alliance between the two countries, despite criticizing the pact six months ago.
“As the security environment continues to evolve and new challenges arise, it is essential that our alliance further strengthen and deepen,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday. “I am confident that in the months and years ahead, Japan’s contributions to our mutual security will continue to grow, and the alliance will continue to thrive.”
In June last year, Trump told a news conference in Japan that the treaty — signed six decades ago yesterday and the linchpin of Japan’s defense policy — was “unfair” and should be changed, echoing his long-held view that Japan is a free-rider on defense.
Trump at the time added he was not thinking of withdrawing from the pact.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday called for making the treaty more robust.
“We have elevated the relationship to one in which each of us, the US and Japan, protects the other, thereby giving further force to the alliance,” Abe said at a Tokyo reception to mark the anniversary of the signing. “Going forward, it is incumbent upon us to make it even more robust, to make it a pillar for safeguarding peace and security in both outer space and cyberspace.”
The treaty obligates the US to defend Japan, which under its US-drafted constitution renounced the right to wage war after World War II. Japan in return provides military bases used by the US to project power in Asia.
The treaty was signed in 1951 and revised in 1960 under Abe’s grandfather, then-Japanese prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.
Kishi was forced to step down afterward following a massive public outcry from Japanese critics who feared the pact would pull their country into conflict.
Abe since taking office in 2012 has raised Japan’s defense spending by 10 percent after years of decline and his government in 2014 reinterpreted the constitution to allow Japanese troops to fight overseas for the first time since the war.
Although generally supportive of the alliance, Japanese voters remain concerned about their country getting dragged into US-led conflicts.
A survey by the Kyodo news agency showed that 58.4 percent opposed Tokyo’s decision to dispatch a warship and patrol airplanes to the Middle East to help protect ships bringing goods to Japan.
Trump’s administration has also pushed for Japan to pay more for US forces stationed in the country.
Under an agreement reached in 2015, Japan pledged to increase its spending for US forces stationed there by 1.4 percent over the following five years to ¥189.3 billion (US$1.72 billion) per year on average.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of