Nearly 300 Japanese UN peacekeepers arrived in East Timor last weekend, but no sign of the protest which marred an arrival of an advance party earlier this month followed them.
Around 20 Timorese demonstrated against the advance party of two dozen engineers when they arrived on March 4, decrying Japan's occupation of the tiny territory during World War Two when thousands of Timorese were killed.
But the UN said the arrival of the 300 troops in Dili on Saturday and Sunday passed without incident.
"There were no protests at all,'' chief information officer for the UN peacekeepers Lieutenant Colonel Jan Fredrik Drangsholt told reporters, adding they arrived by commercial aircraft.
Around 700 Japanese peacekeepers will eventually be based in East Timor in what will be Japan's largest peacekeeping effort. The rest of the contingent will arrive in the next three to four weeks.
The overseas dispatch of Japanese military forces has long been a sensitive topic in Japan and throughout Asia where memories of the country's past militarism run deep.
East Timor came under UN administration not long after a bloody independence vote in August 1999 that broke from 24 years of often brutal Indonesian rule.
A multinational force led by Australia came in to restore peace to the half-island territory and was later replaced by a UN peacekeeping force.
Australia still has the largest number of troops in the 5,000-strong force of 22 nations which is due to be phased out by June 2004.
The UN said the Japanese would mostly be deployed in Dili, Maliana, Suai, and the enclave of Oecussi.
(China Daily March 25, 2002)
