It also marks a new stage of cooperation between Japan and the United States, its key international ally.

"It is an important precedent for what Japan is going to do for the international community from now on," said Hidekazu Kawai, a professor of international politics at Gakushuin University in Tokyo.

"In current international politics, pure self-defense by such big countries as Japan can no longer work," Kawai said.

"The mission helped reduce Japan's allergic reaction to deployment overseas and showed the direction to go in the future terms of Japan's overseas contribution in the future."

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he was bringing home the 600 troops as they have accomplished their goal of rebuilding the relatively peaceful southern region of Muthanna.

The deployment is the first by Japan since World War II to a country where fighting is underway.

But the ghosts of war remain alive in Asia, with China last year blocking Japan's top foreign policy goal, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, on the grounds that Tokyo has not atoned for its past atrocities.

China has attacked Koizumi for his visits to a controversial war shrine and criticized the Iraq deployment.

However, it is more striking how little most of Asia was concerned by the Iraq mission, said Takehiko Yamamoto, professor of international politics at Waseda University in Tokyo.

"Not so many Asian countries are showing real concern about Japan's deployment overseas, but China is an exception," he said.

"The Japanese mission in Iraq marked another successful improvement in military cooperation between Japan and the United States, which is a bottom line concern for China in terms of the power balance in Northeast Asia," he said.

A bigger concern may be at home, where a majority of the public consistently opposed the Iraq mission.

Koizumi, who touts his personal friendship with US President George W. Bush, went ahead with the deployment despite domestic opposition in a country that has been firmly pacifist for six decades.

Japan had a bitter lesson from the US-led Gulf War in 1991, when it came in for heavy international criticism for not sending personnel despite paying 13.5 billion dollars, or 20 percent of the global contribution.

Japan sent troops to Cambodia in 1993 as part of a UN force and some troops to Thailand and Indonesia to help them recover from the 2004 tsunami disaster. More recently, it sent medical teams from its military to Indonesia following its latest deadly earthquake.

But some analysts said Japan, which has developed warm ties in much of the world through economic cooperation, was misguided to believe it needed to exert its influence through its military.

"Military power can alter people's life temporarily but you are never able to rule people in other countries," said Ryuhei Hatsuse, a professor of politics at Kobe University in western Japan.

"You cannot force people to introduce other countries' social models," Hatsuse said. "I think the deployment was a mistake. Japan must have its own way of international contribution."

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