VLADIVOSTOK, September 5. /TASS/: Washington has not addressed Tokyo with proposals for deploying US missile systems in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at the plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday.
"As far as US missile systems in Japan are concerned, Japan has not received any proposals for their deployment," he said.
Abe stated that "Japan’s current missile defense system is not governed by the United States" and the new systems being purchased from the US manufacturers, Aegis Ashore, "will be controlled by Japan."
Abe added that it would be impossible to use them to launch Tomahawk missiles. In his opinion the situation in Japan is fundamentally different from that in South Korea and Poland, where the United States runs the missile defense systems on its own.
Japan’s budget for the 2019 fiscal year (April 1, 2019 - March 31, 2020) envisages a 1.3% increase in defense spending to $47.5 billion. The increase in spending is related, among other, to the deployment in Japan of two ground-based missile defense systems Aegis Ashore of US manufacture and the purchase of F-35 fighters and missile interceptors SM-3.
