Japan Stands Firm In Iraq

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Wednesday he won't withdraw troops from Iraq despite information a Japanese man has been taken hostage there, Kyodo News reported.

A video posted Tuesday on a militant Islamic Web site showed what it claimed was a Japanese captive kidnapped by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, and threatened to behead him within 48 hours unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq.

Koizumi told Hiroyuki Hosoda, his chief cabinet secretary, "I won't withdraw troops," Kyodo reported.

He also ordered Hosoda to confirm the facts of the case and, if the incident is genuine, to consider measures to free the hostage, Kyodo said.

The new kidnapping was certain to trigger an uproar in Japan and pose a new test to the government, which has dispatched 500 troops to southern Iraq on a humanitarian mission in support of U.S.-led reconstruction efforts despite strong opposition by the Japanese public.

Polls show about half of the country's citizens oppose the troops' dispatch because of fears they could be drawn into the fighting in Iraq, thereby prompting insurgents and terrorists to target Japanese citizens at home and abroad. Many also argue the dispatch violates the country's pacifist postwar constitution, which limits Japanese troops to self-defense of Japan.

A poll published by the national Asahi newspaper on Tuesday showed that 63 percent of Japanese oppose keeping their military in Iraq beyond this year. Twenty-five percent think the troops should stay.

The new crisis comes at a sensitive time politically for Koizumi. He won a boost in popularity for staring down the hostage-takers last time. But he was weakened in July Parliamentary elections in which the main opposition party made strong gains in the upper house.

Japan's troops are also facing more hostility in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah, which was chosen for its relative safety. An unexploded mortar was discovered inside the Japanese base there on Saturday, the first time a projectile has been fired into the camp. The mortar, however, was unarmed and there were no injuries.