BEIJING, Jan 20: Japan's riskiest deployment of troops since World War Two made China wince on Tuesday, but other Asian victims of Japanese wartime aggression seemed to take the news in its stride.

An advance party of about 35 Japanese soldiers, who will prepare for the likely deployment of about 1,000 troops, arrived at a military camp in southern Iraq on Monday, marking a historic shift away from Japan's purely defensive post-war security policy.

"We express concern over this movement," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said. "It would be in line with Japan's interests and conducive to peace and stability in the region and the world if Japan abided by its policy of 'defence limited to its own territory and coastal waters' in earnest and stuck to the road of peaceful development."

Japan and China normalized relations in 1972, but ties have been dogged by their World War Two past characterized by the occupation of parts of China by Japanese troops.

China says 300,000 civilians died in the 1937 Nanjing massacre when Japanese imperial troops overran the Chinese Nationalist capital. China's comments on Tuesday appeared muted in comparison with the fiery rhetoric it has used after visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's war dead by a succession of prime ministers.

"China is much more confident than before, so its reaction to such issues is more rational than before," said Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at People's University.

A law enacted last July allows the troop dispatch, but Japan's pacifist post-war constitution limits the military's activity to "non-combat zones", a murky concept in Iraq, where occupying troops are under daily attack.

On the Korean peninsula, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, reaction was split. In North Korea, the ruling Worker's Party mouthpiece newspaper Rodong Sinmun said talk in Tokyo of a revamp of Japan's defence posture if the Iraq deployment is a success "reveals the aggressive nature of Japan turning to the right and heading for its militarization".

There has been no official reaction and little media attention paid to the Iraq troop deployment by Japan in South Korea, which itself has decided to send 3,000 troops to Iraq in April to augment the 675 already working there.

In Singapore, occupied by Japan from 1942-45, the Straits Times newspaper said it was "churlish and short-sighted" to argue that the troop deployment was a sign of rising militarism in Japan.

Rather, Japan could help create a secure and stable Iraq. "For the sake of Iraq, political stability in the Middle East, the security of oil supplies and the cut-no-corners war on terror, Japan and other countries must persevere with the hard work of bringing Iraq back to normal," it said. "Fear is not an option."

The Japanese troops will be based in the Shia-dominated southern city of Samawa, where they will conduct reconstruction and humanitarian operations. Japanese forces have taken part in UN operations since a 1992 law made that possible. -Reuters