Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Japan’s Abe plans to revise charter
Amending constitution on military’s status focus of proposal
TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on Wednesday announced a plan to revise a pacifist constitution that has been in place since it was enacted by American occupiers in 1947.
In a video message delivered at a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the constitution, Abe said he wanted to make “explicit the status” of the country’s self-defense forces by amending the constitution by 2020.
As Japan faces continuing security threats from North Korea, Abe said there should be no room for arguing that the military, with just over 227,000 active-duty troops, “may be unconstitutional.”
Japan has stepped up its show of military force over concerns about North Korea’s provocative behavior, sending two naval destroyers to join the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in exercises off the Korean Peninsula. And on Monday, a Japanese warship accompanied a U.S. Navy supply ship headed to join the Carl Vinson and three other warships in a strike group.
Pacifism is enshrined in the constitution, with a clause known as Article 9 calling for the complete renunciation of war. That clause represents a cherished part of the country’s postwar identity, and Abe has long made clear his desire to amend it. Previous calls to revise it have been met with skepticism in Japan and in countries including China and South Korea that object to any signs of Japan’s remilitarization.
Successive Japanese governments, as well as scholars, have argued that the military is constitutional because the charter allows the country to defend itself.
But Abe has pushed for a much broader interpretation, and two years ago he helped secure passage of security legislation that authorized overseas combat missions by the military in the name of “collective self-defense” and alongside allied troops. The passage of the laws came after a grinding political battle and days of public demonstrations.
Acknowledging the politically delicate nature of the latest proposal to revise the constitution, Abe said Wednesday that the country “must hold fast to the idea of pacifism.”
Analysts said it was a shrewd calculation intended to reassure skeptics and set a precedent for revision. Abe and his Cabinet “are aware that Article 9 is very popular, and revising Article 9 is going to be alarming to many countries around them,” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo. Just last week, a survey by the public broadcaster NHK found that 82 percent of respondents were “proud of the current constitution that advocates pacifism.”
Nakano said Abe’s proposal “could be a convincing idea, but it also could also bring forth inevitable criticism that you’ve broken the constitution first, and you are ex post facto trying to make it OK.”
About 55,000 people attended a meeting in Tokyo opposing the amendment, and opposition was strong on social media.
“Is there an earnest desire among people to change the current constitution at all costs? I’ve never heard that there are many such voices,” wrote Tomo Kimura on Twitter, a sentiment that was shared almost 1,300 times.
Jun Okumura, a former official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and now a visiting researcher at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs, said he thought Abe would be able to pass the amendment. In an election in July, Abe’s governing coalition and its allies captured two-thirds of the seats in the upper house of parliament, the amount required to proceed with a constitutional revision.
Any revision also would be subject to approval in a referendum.