North Korea and China are watching for possible regional impacts from Japan's recent enhanced security cooperation with Germany.
This weekend, Japan will hold joint drills with Germany around the Chitose Air Base in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island. Spain is slated to join them there, while France will join Japan next week for drills over Hyakuri Air Base in Ibaraki Prefecture bordering the Pacific Ocean.
At a joint press conference in Berlin late last week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said defense cooperation will be enhanced by the planned visits of German aircraft and frigates to Japan and of a Japanese training fleet to Hamburg this summer.
North Korea slammed the security cooperation as "collusion" that crossed a "red line" and is "reminiscent of the Second World War," according to North Korea's state-run KCNA on Monday.
"The defeated war criminal nations are in cahoots to stage a series of war games escalating the regional tensions," KCNA continued.
Kishida said Japan hopes to work with Germany "to deal with the deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea as well as China's moves related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine," according to Nippon.com, a news agency based in Tokyo.
Kishida and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz agreed in Berlin on Friday to boost their security cooperation after attending a NATO summit in Washington. It was Kishida's first trip to Germany as prime minister.
Pact enters into force
Also on Friday, a military supply-sharing pact that aims to exchange food, fuel, and ammunition between Japan and Germany entered into force. The agreement was signed in January.
Beijing said the cooperation between Japan and Germany should not create tensions in the Asia-Pacific region.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA on Monday that "cooperation between countries, including military and security ties, should not target any third party or harm their interests."
Maki Kobayashi, Japanese cabinet secretary for public affairs, told VOA's Mandarin Service during the NATO summit that Japan has been working "very closely" with NATO countries on security issues and joint exercises.
"China has been saying there is an attempt at creating NATO in Asia, which is not correct," she said.
Rather, she said, Japan has been seeking closer ties among like-minded countries "to share situational analyses and also align some policies" in support of an international order based on the rule of law.
In Berlin, Kishida and Scholz also agreed to enhance economic security including safeguarding the resilience of supply chains for key items such as critical minerals and semiconductors.
Cooperation seen two different ways
In Washington last week, the leaders of NATO and four Indo-Pacific countries, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, discussed how to ramp up their combined defense capacity.
"A union of defense industrial bases between NATO and IP4 countries would have significant and positive implications for international peace and stability," said Matthew Brummer, professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
"Japan has recently moved to provide surface-to-air missiles to the United States, which then sends them to Ukraine," he added.
In December, Tokyo agreed to ship Japanese-made Patriot guided missiles to backfill U.S. inventory after taking a major step away from its pacifist self-defense policies and easing its postwar ban on the export of lethal weapons.
"In general, the NATO-IP4 cooperation is a good thing, since it symbolizes the recognition that both the Indo-Pacific theater and the European theater are linked," Elli-Katharina Pohlkamp, visiting fellow of the Asia Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations based in Berlin said via email.
However, she continued, "Strengthening NATO-IP4 ties could exacerbate tensions with China and Russia, who may perceive this cooperation as a containment strategy," and encourage countries like North Korea to align more closely with them.
Adam Xu contributed to this report.
