If you can call South Sudan "stable," you can call anything stable. You can call anything anything.
Defense Minister Tomomi Inada's sunny assessment of this infant African nation in the throes of civil war followed her whirlwind tour last month. What did she see? Stability, obviously. She saw more of that in seven hours than veteran aid worker Takaki Imai of the Japan International Volunteer Center (JVC) has seen in the nine years he's been posted there. Inada saw what she wanted to see, Imai tells Weekly Playboy magazine.
She has her reasons. The government is eager to expand the scope of Japan's participation in a U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. The Self-Defense Forces (SDF) have been part of this mission since 2012. Japan's pacifist Constitution limits them to nonmilitary functions like building roads. Such a modest role is unworthy of a great nation, say those determined to make Japan a great nation. Security legislation rammed through the Diet last year would in effect re-militarize Japan's military and arm its peacekeepers — in South Sudan to start with, elsewhere once the precedent has been set.