North Korea on Tuesday denounced Japan's latest defense white paper, calling it an attempt to justify the country's military buildup and describing it as legal basis for "the operation of war machine." Kang Won-chol, an international security analyst, made the claims in an article published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and the Rodong Sinmun, the most widely read newspaper in the North. Kang said the white paper came out at a time when "Japan has been rushing headlong into militarization, seized with an ambition for reinvasion." He argued Japan had "groundlessly" described North Korea as a "serious and imminent threat" in the white paper to justify its "reckless" military buildup. "It is nothing but an act of turning black into white that Japan stipulated the 'threat' from neighboring countries in the white paper although it has been putting spurs to the tightening of the alliance with the U.S. and its followers after setting it as a 'state policy' to negate its past crimes and realize its ambition to become a military power," he wrote. He also cited Japanese Defense Minister S