Japan’s Kaifu to Visit Mideast for Talks : Policy: The nation is still debating a response to demands that it send forces to the gulf.

In an apparent effort to salvage Japan’s tarnished image as a global power after its much-delayed response to the Persian Gulf crisis, Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu will visit the Middle East early next month for talks with leaders of the front-line gulf states, the Foreign Ministry announced Tuesday.

In effect, Kaifu will be resurrecting an itinerary that was canceled--in keeping with Japan’s traditional low-posture foreign policy--after Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

After attending the United Nations-sponsored world summit conference on children in New York, Kaifu will leave Oct. 1 for a seven-day tour of Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Oman, Foreign Ministry officials said.

The announcement came as Japanese bureaucrats and political leaders were locked in a protracted, mostly closed-door debate over how Japan should answer international demands that it take part in the peacekeeping effort with manpower as well as money.

It was not made clear whether an agreement would be reached on a plan of action before Kaifu leaves Friday for New York.

The Kaifu administration procrastinated for weeks before pledging $4 billion for the international response to Iraq’s aggression--$2 billion as aid to gulf states hurt by the economic sanctions against Iraq and $2 billion to help support the U.S.-led military deployment in the region.

But the government has ruled out sending uniformed military personnel, saying that the Japanese constitution forbids it to send the so-called Self-Defense Forces overseas.

Discussion now centers on a proposal to create a “U.N. Peace Cooperation Team” by drafting a new law that would allow sending a corps of 1,000 or more people to join U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping efforts in foreign trouble spots. The team would apparently include some Self-Defense Forces personnel, but it would be unarmed and non-military in function, according to the consensus in official thinking, Foreign Ministry spokesman Taizo Watanabe said.

Even if agreement is reached soon, a special session of Parliament would have to be called to act on it, and support from opposition parties will have to be solicited because Kaifu’s Liberal Democratic Party lacks a majority in the upper house.

The largest opposition group, the Japan Socialist Party, announced only recently that it would accept the existence of the Self-Defense Forces within Japan, but emphasized its opposition to sending them abroad in any capacity.

The centrist Komeito, or Clean Government Party, is the likely swing vote in the upper house, but it is Buddhist-backed and pacifist.

Ministry spokesman Watanabe acknowledged that, at the earliest, it would be “a matter of months” before a new law could go into effect and a Japanese government peacekeeping team could be mobilized, raising serious doubts as to whether it would play even a symbolic role in the current Middle East crisis.

“Japan has never faced this kind of choice before,” Watanabe said, “and for the Japanese government to reach a decision to create an organization that can cope with this kind of situation, a matter of months is a very short time. You need to put yourselves in the shoes of the Japanese people to appreciate how quickly we are moving along.”

Meanwhile, a previously announced plan to send 100 non-government medical volunteers to the gulf is getting off to a slow start. An advance team of 17 has been sent and will report back before further steps are taken.