In 1955, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu told U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Japan could send its Self-Defense Forces overseas to protect the U.S. territory of Guam, Japanese diplomatic records showed Wednesday.
Such an SDF dispatch for the purpose of defense would be considered justified under the Constitution, Shigemitsu said. His remarks came decades before Japan enacted national security laws in 2015 to allow the country to exercise collective self-defense in some cases.
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