Japanese Military Unit Uses Point Mugu Base to Test-Fire Missiles : Weapons: The 150 soldiers spend three months sending warheads out to sea to gauge performance.

A Japanese military unit has been firing missiles off the Ventura County coast.

Fifty years ago, such news might have sent residents scurrying for cover and placed U.S. military troops on red alert.

But the Japanese missiles were fired from the Point Mugu Navy base in a cooperative arrangement with the super-secret weapons division of the Naval Air Warfare Center.

For the past three months, a 150-man Japanese unit worked closely with U.S. engineers, military officials and sophisticated computers to test Japan’s newest missile.

Allowing foreign military units to operate at Point Mugu is nothing new. The Japanese army is only one of 12 foreign forces that have personnel stationed at the base.

Norway, Germany and Australia are among the nations that have military units on base. Other foreign military contingents at Point Mugu have included the Royal Navy of Great Britain and the Imperial Iranian Air Force, which tested jet fighters there before the fall of the Shah.

Foreign forces come to Point Mugu to take advantage of the base’s state-of-the-art weapons-testing station and massive ocean test range, where missiles are routinely fired up to 250 miles out to sea.

Scientists and engineers can track and evaluate the missiles’ performances from a computer-filled room at Point Mugu that resembles the control rooms used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during various space shots.

Some nations find it less expensive to pay to use this sophisticated test range than to try to duplicate it, Point Mugu officials said. But the price is still not cheap.

Japan paid more than $7.6 million for testing four missiles at the range over the past three months, said Col. Akio Hinata, the commander of the Japanese unit at Point Mugu.

“We don’t have any long-range missile” testing facility, Hinata said. And, he said, even if Japan wanted one, the country would not be able to establish an open-ocean missile range off its coast because the waters are crowded with fishing boats.

“It’s dangerous, you know?” he said.

Japan’s price tag for the Point Mugu facilities includes a full-time civilian liaison who accompanies the troops wherever they go on base. The fee does not cover room and board.

The 150 soldiers, who returned to Tokyo on Nov. 28, stayed at the Radisson Suite Hotel in Oxnard and cooking most of their Japanese-style meals in their hotel kitchenettes.

Lunch was ordered out daily from a Japanese restaurant.

The midday meals were delivered to the unit’s offices in a large trailer on base, where the men ate at their desks or on folding tables--a stark contrast to their customary, low-set tables in the cafeteria at their base in Tokyo.

“Lunch is different,” Hinata said with a smile.

On weekends, the group explored Southern California, chartering buses for Disneyland, Solvang and other tourist spots.

Hinata’s unit was the third Japanese army troop to come to Point Mugu in the past three years for testing the SSM-1, a surface-to-surface missile.

The repeated tests enable the army to monitor the performance of each new batch of SSM-1s manufactured. The tests measure how far the weapons go, how well they hit their targets and other factors.

The missile tests are also an opportunity for training the troops, Hinata said.

Hinata and his officers stressed during interviews that Japan’s weaponry, like the army itself, is solely for defense.

“We have a restriction in the constitution,” Maj. Karou Degawa said.

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, military bases throughout the country were razed and the several million men in the armed forces were disbanded by the conquering Allied Forces.

Japan adopted a new constitution that forbade the military to take action other than in self-defense. The all-volunteer military forces that were formed starting in the late 1940s are called the Self-Defense Forces.

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces flew military cargo aircraft to transport refugees during the Persian Gulf War. More recently, troops have been sent to Cambodia to help oversee the fragile peace there.

Both operations sparked bitter debates in Japan, where a strong anti-military sentiment has made it difficult for the nation to recruit volunteer soldiers.

In view of those public sentiments and the constitutional restriction, Hinata was careful to point out what may seem to the non-Japanese a merely semantic distinction:

“We don’t participate in peacekeeping forces, just peacekeeping operations,” he said, indicating that the Self-Defense Forces help maintain peace only through their presence, not through combat.