POLITICS-JAPAN: Views on Changing Constitution Remain Divided

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jun 25 2007 (IPS) - From a vehement no to a qualitative yes – those are the views of Myoko Watanabe’s family on a national referendum due in 2010 on amending the post-war, Peace Constitution of Japan.

“I am dead against the attempt to change the Constitution, which has protected Japan’s image as a peace-loving country. Japan must never be involved in wars again,” Watanabe, a 64-year-old former hairdresser, said in an interview.

But her husband and two children express different opinions. Yuichi, 68, while sharing his wife’s reservations about taking out Article 9 of the Constitution, the peace clause that prohibits Japan from waging war, supports a change in item two on the article that would allow Tokyo to enter a collective defence arrangement with the United States. This would be a step further than Japan’s current status, which allows it only to defending itself from aggression.

“It’s natural that Japan must be able to work closely with the United States against the looming North Korea crisis. Times have changed from sixty-three years ago,” Yuichi explained.

Such a range of opinions, points out professor Masao Fukunaga, an expert on international relations at Rikkyo University, underscores the importance of the issue among the Japanese public as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a conservative, determinedly steers the debate toward revising Japan’s Constitution.

The charter was launched in 1947, after Japan was defeated at the end of World War II by Allied troops in 1945.

At the core of the debate is whether to change all aspects of the war-renouncing Article 9, or some aspects of it. Abe, who stands for an active military role for Japan with the United States in international affairs, is ready to sweep away the restraints that the country has had for decades.

“While other countries, including Germany that was also defeated like Japan, have amended their Constitutions many times, the issue has never been even considered among the Japanese who did not, until now, even want to think of the idea given their tortured experience of war,” explained Professor Koichi Ishiyama of Tooin University.

But the idea is now emerging that it is time to move away from pacifism, Fukunaga says, as Japan is the second-richest country in the world and a key international partner with the West, its former enemies, through its formidable aid budget and private investment.

“The new concept under the slogan for changing the Constitution is working for global peace. That image is highly appealing to the general public, but that does not mean they are wholly behind Abe’s notion of a strong military,” he commented to IPS.

An Asahi newspaper poll in May, just after the Lower House endorsed a national referendum on May 18, showed that more than 70 percent favoured a revision of the Constitution.

Indeed, company employee Minoru Watanabe, a son of Myoko, says his mother’s steadfast opposition to a revision represents a generation that is clearly different from his.

“I understand her position, but I also think Japan is ready to go ahead with taking a leadership role in the world,” he said. “Without a national military, this is not possible. The change in the Constitution is thus timely.”

Still, Myoko Watanabe argues that such a change brings back the harsh memories of war. As a young girl, Myoko watched her mother struggle to survive without proper food, medicine or housing. Yet another dreaded fact of life was being forced to follow orders by the military, which controlled their lives and thoughts.

Prime Minister Abe hopes to highlight the referendum on the Constitution to try to get back more public support. He is now grappling with declining popularity ratings – down 36 percent in a new Nikkei newspaper poll reported Monday – and has pushed back by a few days to Jul. 29 the date of a crucial election for the Upper House.

Abe has also been stung by controversies such one around a blunder on the record-keeping of pensions – millions of people over 60 years old were denied pensions in April – and the May suicide of an agricultural minister who was facing corruption charges.

In his statement on Constitution Day, May 3, Abe describes the proposed amendment as a chance for Japan to finally put a psychological end to post-war occupation, an opinion shared by powerful conservative politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party and their supporters.

But experts say the going will not be easy for Abe, given the stipulation that a constitutional amendment must receive a two-thirds majority in the Japanese parliament.

Whatever the vote, though, Prof. Hiroshi Nakanishi of Kyoto University points out that even with the supposed limits of Japan’s military, the stark reality is that the Constitution has been skillfully manoeuvred by politicians in order to get Tokyo to send troops to support the U.S. military in Iraq and to boost the strength of U.S. naval and military presence in Okinawa in south-west Japan.