After 70 years of peace, pacifist education, and a populace which believes the Self-Defense Forces are more a uniformed disaster-response team than an armed organization dedicated to the defense of Japan, the Japanese polity simply doesn’t understand how complicated military operations carry a degree of risk, which occasionally results in fatal accidents. Nor do they understand that the United States’ most advanced military equipment — often deployed first to Japan, out of a long list of many desiring countries — are more risk-prone than well-established equipment by its very nature of being new and advanced.(…)
In any case, Japan would do well to prepare its citizenry for the tragic realities of operating cutting-edge military equipment, a necessary evil in an increasingly challenging regional security environment.