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main opposition party, Minshut - , albeit insisting that it would
rst have to
change the Constitution to make such a dispatch legal. Like the general
public discourse, supporters at
first expressed reluctance to dispatch the SDF
overseas, but most were persuaded by Komeito
s stance that although this was
not ideal, the SDF was probably the only current contribution, however small,
that Japan could make to help the Iraqi people with reconstructing their
country. The argument went that it was simply too dangerous to send civil or
non-military groups there. Young supporters, while apprehensive about sending
the SDF overseas, agreed that since Japan had supported the invasion, it had
the responsibility to
'
find ways to help the Iraqi people reconstruct their
country.
In an interview with a group of students from the Law Department of Soka
University, a department that is dominated by the view that the existence of
the SDF is unconstitutional, these students said that legally under the current
constitution they disagreed with the dispatch. They maintained that addi-
tional legislation was necessary to make this a legal operation. On the other
hand, most of them agreed that dispatching the SDF to help to reconstruct
Iraq was probably the only thing Japan could do and they would support that
as long as it was legal. In Japan at the time, while discussions were centred on
the legality of such an operation, there was widespread apprehension about
dispatching the SDF to Iraq because it meant that Japanese people might be
killed. This was something that had not occurred since World War II, and
something of which most living Japanese people had no experience.
Such concerns became acutely apparent when two Japanese diplomats were
killed in Iraq in December 2003. The whole country seemed to be in shock as
a televised state funeral with military parades, probably the
first since the end
of World War II, was held for the two diplomats. One of those killed hap-
pened to be a friend of one of the Komeito supporters I had been speaking to
over the two months prior to this event. This person, herself working for the
civil service, had in theory agreed with Komeito that there was not much else
Japan could do for the Iraqi people but help them reconstruct their country
through the SDF. By this personal tragedy, she was brought face to face with
the fact that this might very easily mean the death of the people being sent to
Iraq, SDF or no SDF. She found herself at a crossroads as to what to think
about the rhetoric being employed by the government about the use of SDF
personnel, people who had families at home and who personally had nothing
to do with the war: the general sentiment in Japan was why should such people
support reconstruction in Iraq and risk their own lives? She was struggling
with renewed dilemmas brought about by her perspective as a civil servant,
from the perspective as a supporter of Komeito, and from her personal feel-
ings about the loss of this person, which felt so meaningless. Yet, she was also
asking herself, given the circumstances, what else could Japan do?
What were the implications of this
, which young sup-
porters themselves at least partly supported in theory, now becoming the
dominant narrative on how best to approach the objective of peace? Did this
'
action-based peace
'
 
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