Japan prepares to drop its pacifist mask as the right rises

Japan appears to be edging ever closer to a referendum on its pacifist constitution, after a realignment of parliamentary forces delivered the supermajority needed to put the change to a public vote. For nearly eight decades, Article 9 of the 1947 constitution – drafted under Allied occupation and long treated as untouchable – has prevented Tokyo from formally maintaining a military with “war potential”. That article has outlasted every previous attempt to change it. But Japanese conservatives now believe Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has what her predecessors lacked: the numbers, the public mood and the political will to finish the job. Takaichi swept to a landslide election victory in the House of Representatives in February, with her pro-amendment allies also now commanding more than two-thirds of seats in the Upper House “Momentum is building once again,” Tsutomu Nishioka, a visiting professor at Reitaku University and a senior figure in the conservative Japan Institute for National Fundamentals think tank, told This Week in Asia. Nishioka has watched the debate for decades and believes the conditions today are unlike any that preceded them. Gone is the pacifist-leaning Komeito party, long a brake on constitutional adventurism within the ruling coalition, replaced by the Japan Innovation Party, whose hawkish instincts sit comfortably alongside those of Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party. The geopolitical backdrop has also changed beyond recognition. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered comfortable assumptions about the inviolability of borders, while North Korea’s expanding missile programme and China’s military build-up have concentrated Japanese minds in ways that years of LDP rhetoric could not. Observers say a public that once associated militarism with catastrophe has begun to reconsider that position. “In the past, Japanese people felt that having a military would attract conflict,” said Ken Kato, a conservative-learning business owner in Tokyo who supports revising the constitution. “Now, the feeling is that if Japan does not have the ability to defend itself, then others will use that weakness to overcome us. People realise we need a deterrent.” On some level, Article 9’s prohibition on maintaining a standing military has long been a legal fiction. Japan has had its Self-Defence Forces – among Asia’s most capable and well-funded armed services – for decades, through a constitutional interpretation that has been stretched, revised and reinterpreted with each successive security crisis. Conservatives now want those men and women in the uniform to be formally recognised as members of the country’s military. “Article 9 should be amended because it does not align with reality today or the norms of international law,” Nishioka said. “Changing the law would better safeguard peace and Japan’s national security.” Keiji Furuya, an LDP lawmaker who chairs a panel in the lower house of parliament that is responsible for deliberating constitutional amendments, believes the government has the numbers needed. Furuya told the Japan Forward website late last month that he hoped a referendum would be held “within a year”, noting that the LDP’s 101 Upper House seats – when combined with 19 from its coalition partner, 44 from four minor right-wing parties and the support of three independents – would produce 167 votes, one more than the 166 required to formally initiate a constitutional amendment. He described the current impasse as a “dereliction of duty” by the legislature, arguing that ordinary Japanese citizens were being denied a say in their own constitutional future. But Takaichi would not be the first Japanese prime minister to try, and fail, to amend Article 9. Shinzo Abe spent a solid chunk of his record tenure in pursuit of constitutional revision and never brought it to a vote. Subsequent leaders, including Fumio Kishida, fared no better. Tadashi Anno, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, detects a note of hubris in the current enthusiasm. “Takaichi may be doing well in the polls at the moment,” he said. “But we must not forget the situation in Iran, rising prices here in Japan, the depreciation of the yen and other pressures that will eat away at that support.” Anno’s own view on the constitution is nuanced. He supports revision, just not the sort that the LDP has in mind. He points to Article 24, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, as an example of anachronistic language with real and damaging consequences: it has provided legal cover for blocking same-sex marriage, a cause that commands growing public sympathy. On Article 9 specifically, Anno was cautious. He recalled the LDP’s “wholesale review of the entire constitution” in 2012 after a rare spell in opposition, resulting in a draft “that would make it a very conservative document”. “If that was put to the Japanese people, I do not think the kind of language that was used would be appreciated by the majority,” he said. “My feeling is that any changes would have to be much more limited, and that would include Article 9.”

Japan prepares to drop its pacifist mask as the right rises

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A right-wing parliamentary supermajority is paving the way for Tokyo to amend its post-war pacifist constitution

A right-wing parliamentary supermajority is paving the way for Tokyo to amend its post-war pacifist constitution