China Calls on Former Enemy (Japan)
It would be the first deployment of Japanese soldiers in China since Japan invaded in World War II, creating a bitterness that continues today.
Japanese civilian teams were the first foreign emergency workers invited to assist in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
"The Chinese Government has submitted a new request regarding provision of relief materials as well as transportation means, including that possibly to be extended by the SDF," a Foreign Ministry's spokesman, Hiroshi Suzuki, said. Japan refers to its military as the SDF - Self-Defence Forces.
The Kyodo news agency said China had sounded out Tokyo about sending military planes to deliver relief materials.
The Foreign Ministry said it was holding discussions with the Defence Ministry about what kind of help it could provide.
The Japanese embassy in Beijing said yesterday it could not comment. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply.
Sino-Japanese ties chilled during Junichiro Koizumi's 2001-06 term as Japan's prime minister over his visits to the Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo, seen by critics as an offensive symbol of wartime misdeeds.
They improved after he stepped down and relations between the two Asian giants have further warmed since the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, visited Japan this month, the first state visit in a decade by a Chinese leader.
The aid request comes as the quake area continues to be stricken with aftershocks that toppled another 420,000 homes in Qingchuan county on Tuesday.
Mr Hu has called the Sichuan earthquake China's biggest and most challenging relief operation since Communist China's founding in 1949. The Government said 15 million people - three times the original estimate - have been displaced.
Soldiers are battling to prevent the biggest "quake lake", Tangjiashan in Beichuan county, from bursting, and 150,000 people living below the swollen lake have been evacuated.
Mr Hu's remarks, released on Tuesday after he presided over a meeting of the politburo, indicated that the relief operations were at a critical stage as officials coped with crowded refugee camps and rising temperatures.
The area has suffered almost 200 aftershocks.
The banking regulator has ordered banks to write off bad loans caused by the earthquake as education authorities promised to preserve all school sites for investigation into alleged shoddy construction.
