Military experts sounded the alarm yesterday over the Japanese military's ability to defend the country after one of its most advanced naval destroyers crashed into a fishing boat, leaving two missing.
Tuesday's collision came as Japan steps up security to ensure safety during July's G8 summit, to be held in the northern resort town of Toyako.
The 165m-long Atago destroyer, returning from a visit to Hawaii to its home port of Yokosuka, crashed into the tuna-fishing boat off the Pacific coast south of Tokyo.
Planes, boats and divers continued their search for a second day yesterday for a father and son who were onboard when the small boat was smashed in half.
The accident sparked bewilderment in Japan as the Atago is the latest and largest of Japan's destroyers, equipped with an Aegis radar system developed by the US, seen as a frontline defense against a North Korean missile attack.
"I may not come off as an expert, but I wonder whether the fishing boat was not detected by the radar," said Yoshimi Watanabe, Japan's state minister in charge of administrative and regulatory reforms.
"What if it had been a terrorist boat on a suicide bombing [mission]?" he asked.
The Aegis system can track incoming missiles by radar, a concern since North Korea fired a missile over Japan's main island in 1998.
"Japan's security cannot be ensured if an Aegis-equipped destroyer fails to avert a collision with a fishing boat," the Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.
The destroyer reportedly hit the brakes only one minute before the collision -- suggesting it spotted the small boat very late.
"If they cannot act in an actual case like this, it is a problem no matter how high quality their equipment and training," said Hisao Iwashima, a military analyst and professor at Seigakuin University Graduate School.
"I believe it was nothing but their carelessness that caused the accident," he said.
Japanese forces have not fired a shot in combat since the end of World War II when the country became constitutionally pacifist and formed a security alliance with the US.
Iwashima asked if the military -- known as the Self-Defense Forces because of the Constitution -- were too dependent on machines at the expense of human ability.
"They must not be alert enough as they had finished an exercise in Hawaii and were reaching their home port," he said.
But Tadasu Kumagai, another military specialist, said it was a misunderstanding that ships with the Aegis system were looking at threats in the immediate vicinity.
"It has an advanced radar for air defense, but its navigational radar is about the same quality as that of a fishing boat," he said.
Kumagai said that worries over suicide attacks from small boats going undetected were very real.
"A small boat is difficult to find on a navigational radar," he said. "That would be a problem."
The Mainichi Shimbun said the Atago, built at a cost of ¥140 billion (US$1.3 billion), could face public criticism as a waste of money.
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