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By Tim Kelly
TOKYO (Reuters) -U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Japan on Sunday as indispensable for tackling Chinese aggression and said implementing of a plan to upgrade the U.S military command in the country would get under way.
"We share a warrior ethos that defines our forces," Hegseth told Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani at a meeting in Tokyo. "Japan is our indispensable partner in deterring communist Chinese military aggression," including across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
Calling Japan a "cornerstone of peace and security in the Indo-Pacific", he said President Donald Trump's government would continue to work closely with its key Asian ally.
In July, then-President Joe Biden's White House announced a major revamp of the U.S. military command in Japan to deepen coordination with Tokyo's forces, as the two countries labelled China their "greatest strategic challenge".
That change will place a combined operational commander in Japan, who would be a counterpart to the head of a joint operation command established by the Japan's Self-Defense Forces last week.
TROOPS IN JAPAN
Hegseth's praise of Japan contrasts with the criticism he levelled at European allies in February, telling them they should not assume the U.S. presence there would last forever. Trump has complained that the bilateral defence treaty, in which Washington pledges to defend Tokyo, is not reciprocal. In his first term, he said Japan should pay more to host U.S. troops.
Japan hosts 50,000 U.S. military personnel, squadrons of fighter jets and Washington's only forward-deployed aircraft carrier strike group along a 3,000-km (1,900-mile) East Asian archipelago that hems in Chinese military power.
It comes as Japan doubles military spending, including money to purchase longer-range missiles. The operational scope of its forces, however, is constrained by its U.S.-authored constitution, adopted after its World War Two defeat, which renounces the right to make war.
Hegseth and Nakatani agreed to accelerate a plan to jointly produce beyond-visual-range air-to-air AMRAAM missiles and to consider collaborating on production of SM-6 surface-to-air defence missiles to help ease a shortage of munitions, Nakatani said.
Hegseth said he asked his counterpart for greater access to Japan's strategic southwest islands, along the edge of the contested East China Sea close to Taiwan.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SIGNAL CHAT
Hegseth, on his first official visit to Asia, travelled to Japan from the Philippines. On Saturday he attended a memorial service on Iwo Jima, the site 80 years ago of fierce fighting between U.S. and Japanese forces.
His trip has been overshadowed by revelations he texted the details of imminent U.S. strikes on Yemen on a Signal messaging app group that included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, along with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Hegseth on Sunday did not respond to a shouted question about whether he had posted classified information to the group.
Gabbard told Congress on Tuesday that the defence secretary would be the one to determine what defence information is classified.
(Reporting by Tim Kelly and Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo; Additional reporting by Ethan Wang in Beijing Writing by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by William Mallard)
