Vice President Harris meets Japanese Prime Minister

TOKYO AP U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shortly after arriving in Tokyo for the state funeral of former leader Shinzo Abe.

Abe, a former prime minister who was assassinated in July, will be honored on Tuesday, and Harris is leading a U.S. delegation to pay its respects.

The alliance between Japan and the United States is a cornerstone of peace, stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region, she said Monday at Akasaka Palace.

Abe poured his heart and soul into strengthening ties between their two countries, according to Kishida.

Kishida said that it is my duty to carry on his aspirations.

Abe forged closer ties with the United States at a time of increased concern about China's ambitions, and Kishida is continuing his push for a stronger national defense.

The possibility of a war over Taiwan, a self-governed island China claims as part of its own territory, has troubled Japan, which would likely be pulled into such a conflict.

President Joe Biden said last week that the U.S. would send troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked.

The president has addressed that issue. A senior administration official who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting said that the vice president will align with the president if it comes up.

The official said Harris would make clear commitments to Japan's security. More than 50,000 U.S. troops are based there.

Harris will visit South Korea and its prime minister Han Duck-soo on Thursday, while Harris will make a trip to the Demilitarized Zone, a border area with North Korea, which is jointly controlled by the American-led United Nations Command and North Korea.

A White House official said that Harris will tour sites at the DMZ and visit with troops there to demonstrate that the U.S. commitment to South Korea's defense is ironclad. Her visit will come the same week that North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile in response to joint military exercises between the U.S. and Korea, the first by a ranking U.S. official since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to the DMZ in August. Harris is the highest-level American to go to the DMZ since former President Donald Trump visited in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Harris is going to spend three nights in Tokyo and is visiting Japan at a politically fraught moment. Kishida's decision to hold a state funeral for Abe, a conservative nationalist, has been controversial in a country where such memorials are uncommon, and some people oppose honoring him in this way.

Kishida wants Japan to have the world's third largest military budget in the coming years, after the United States and China, which is why he is pushing for a dramatic expansion of defense spending. A new national security strategy, the first in almost a decade, is in the works as well.

Christopher Johnstone, Senior Advisor and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the debate is playing out as Japan reevaluates the risk of war after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He said that the fighting in Europe shows that conflict is possible, and Japan lives in a very difficult neighborhood. Japan is considering using missiles for preemptive strikes, a move critics say would fundamentally change the country's defense policy and breach the postwar pacifist constitution that limits use of force to self-defense.

It has shifted its defense from northeast to southwestern Japan, including Okinawa and other remote islands.