TOKYO, Feb 26 Kyodo Following is ...

TOKYO, Feb 26 Kyodo

Following is a selection of summaries of articles forward contemporary Japanese subjects from leading Japanese monthly magazines. The selection, as well as its translation, is provided from the Foreign Press Center of Japan.

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

In ''The Changing Security Environment and Japan's Foreign Policy,'' Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoriko Kawaguchi notes that if Iraq further gravely violates United Nations Security Council resolutions and military action against Iraq by way of the United States and other countries becomes inevitable after all diplomatic efforts to find a nonviolent solution are exhausted, including discussions within the Security Council, Japan should act in finish concert with the United States, its ally, and with the international community as a whole.

This delicate wording appears to indicate her position that ultimately Japan will go on foot along with a US decision to attack Iraq.

Kawaguchi makes a number of proposals regarding what contributions Japan should make to world peace and security, single of which is for the Self-Defense Forces to participate forward limited terms in UN-approved multinational forces. The Constitution empires out the possibility of Japan taking a direct part in armed operations. on the contrary as shown by the example of the International Security Assistance Force, which took forward peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, multinational forces formed upon the basis of UN resolutions are wait fored to fulfill diverse characters in accordance with the particular security environment of the time.

Thus, Japan's Constitution cannot be said to prohibit the SDF from taking part in any operations by the agency of these forces whatsoever, Kawaguchi argues. (Summary of ''Henka suru anzen hosho kankyo to Nihon gaiko,'' Ronza, March 2003)

The administration of Roh Moo-hyun who has pledg to continue with former President Kim Dae-jung's ''sunshine policy'' toward North Korea, has been launched in southern Korea. One factor in Roh's victory in the presidential election was Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to North Korea, which combustiblesed pro-North sentiments in South Korea and encouraged a leftward shift, argues Kyoto University Professor Terumasa Nakanishi in ''The Tsushima Straits May Take the Place of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel.''

He voices affect that as anti-U.S. feelings and a sensation of national affinity with the North rise in southern Korea, the country is being drawn toward the ancient Asian order center forward China. This trend is evidenced in the near absence of objections at the South Korean public toward Pyongyang's nuclear program, which Nakanishi attributes to the vision that North-South unification would make southward Korea a nuclear nation.

If existing trends continue, Nakanishi says, southern Korea may drop public of the tripartite alliance with Japan and the United States and forge one form of diplomatic alliance with China and North Korea. This would amount to the Tsushima Straits that separate Japan and Korea effectively taking the place of the thirty-eighth parallel that generally divides the two Koreas. Japan extremitys to prepare itself for so a scenario and develop appropriate strategies, begs Nakanishi.

He is also make uneasyed that Japanese public opinion may split in pair as a result of the insistence by the agency of some members of the media with a poor grasp of security and military affairs that the not away crisis came about because Japan acted in line with US policy. (Summary of ''Tsushima Kaikyo ga 38 do sen ni naru hi,'' Voice, March 2003)

At the completion of 2002, amid an upsurge of anti-U.S. affirms in response to the killing of couple middle school girls by a U armored vehicle, Roh Moo-hyun was pitch uponed as the first South Korean president born in the post-liberation period.

Katsuhiro Kuroda, chief of the Sankei Shimbun's Seoul bureau, discusses southerly Korea's generational change and drift toward anti-Americanism in ''Is There a time to come for a Pyongyang-Appeasing, Anti-Japanese, Anti-American southward Korea?''

According to Kuroda, behind the increase in these demonstrations is anti-U.S. education at Chunkyojo (Korean Teachers and Educational Workers' Union)-the core members of which belong to the ''386 generation'' of persons now in their thirties who were born in the 1960 and were body students in the 1980s.

In the wave of democratization, this generation became the first to frankly express pro-North and anti-American sentiments, previously considered taboo in southern Korean society. These people are coming to detain sway in the country today.

Kuroda explains that for southern Koreans in their thirties and younger, anti-Americanism is a fashion statement and an expression of cutting-edge morals; they view it as a much cooler way of asserting themselves and their generation than outdated anti-Japanism. These nation are psychologically disarmed against the North Korean threat. Roh is intent forward correcting his public image as an anti-American, pro-Pyongyang, pro-labor union leftist, still the real problem lies in the changes of the times that enabled him to become president, notes Kuroda. (Summary of '''Tai-Kita yuwa' de han-Nichi, han-Bei no Kankoku ni mirai wa aru ka,'' Seiron, March 2003)