Commentary: Time's headline change -- veil too thin for Japan's growing military drive

TOKYO, May 19 (Xinhua) -- Some Japanese decision-makers often tout the rhetoric of "pacifism," but a recent media kerfuffle has revealed how this "belief" is contradicted by Japan's assertive actions towards bolstering its defense and military ambitions.

Days before the Group of Seven Hiroshima summit, Japan's Foreign Ministry took issue with the headline used by the Time magazine for an interview with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, protesting that there were discrepancies between the headline and the contents of the article.

The digital issue of the article initially bore the headline "Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is turning a once pacifist Japan into a military power." In response to Tokyo's fluster, the U.S. magazine replaced the headline now reading that Kishida "is giving a once pacifist Japan a more assertive role on the global stage."

Meanwhile, Time has not changed the copy on the cover of the May 22-29 print edition, which features Kishida's photo along with text that reads "Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wants to abandon decades of pacifism -- and make his country a true military power."

Japan's military buildup in recent years often relies on diversionary tactics to shroud its intentions, such as hyping up the so-called "China threat." However, such pretexts cannot conceal the country's own motives much longer from its increasingly aggressive behavior.

In recent years, the Japanese government has lifted the ban on the right to collective self-defense, approved revisions to three national security documents for large-scale military expansion and ramped up weapon deployment in its remote southwestern islands. Meanwhile, it is chiming with some Western forces to form cliques and instigate military confrontation in the international community.

The alarming actions of the Japanese government contravene Japan's constitutional commitment to an exclusively defense-oriented policy and pacifism.

Historically, Japan once went down the wrong path of militarism, committed aggression and crimes against humanity, and brought untold disasters to the region and the world. Now the wrong and dangerous military expansion the Kishida government is seeking has heightened the vigilance of neighboring countries.

In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned on Japan's revision of three major security documents, calling it the Kishida government's "categorical rejection" of the concept of peaceful development upheld by his predecessors and a "return to the track of unscrupulous militarization." This shift, the ministry noted, would "inevitably raise new security challenges and lead to heightened tensions in the Asia-Pacific region."

The Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea pointed out that the Kishida government attempts to turn Japan into an "aggressive military power," and slammed Tokyo's adoption of the new security strategy for bringing a serious security crisis to the Korean Peninsula and East Asia.

The Kishida government claims to safeguard regional security, but in fact it provokes confrontation by constantly colluding with the United States and some other Western countries in an attempt to promote its own military expansion and to create an Asia-Pacific version of NATO.

Tokyo's pushback on the Time magazine shows that the headline really has hit the mark. The words of some Japanese politicians have increasingly struggled to mask their deeds of military expansion, revealing a troubling shift away from the country's post-war path of peaceful development.