Push to Revise Japan Pacifist Constitution Growing
09/14/2005
Linda Sieg,
The Boston Globe
TOKYO (Reuters) - This week's huge election victory for Japan's ruling party will boost momentum to revise the nation's pacifist constitution, although it will take time to clear logistical and political hurdles to enact the changes.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's conservative Liberal Democratic Party won a stunning 296 seats in Sunday's election for parliament's lower house, while the LDP and its coalition partner together took 327 seats in the 480-member chamber.
Revision of the constitution was not a main focus of the election, which Koizumi had framed as a referendum on privatizing the postal system as a symbol of his broader reforms.
China and South Korea will be watching closely, though, given their perceptions Japanese nationalism is on the rise, while Washington favors removing restraints to a bigger global and regional security role for Tokyo.
Newspaper surveys published since the election show an overwhelming majority of newly elected lawmakers -- some 70-80 percent -- favor either partial or more sweeping changes.
That percentage jumps to 91 for members of the LDP, according to surveys published on Wednesday by two conservative dailies, the Yomiuri Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun.
"If you're looking for the next issue, it will be very tempting for people to say 'Let's do it now'," said Ellis Krauss, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, who was in Tokyo to observe the election.
Article Nine of the U.S.-drafted constitution renounces the right to go to war and forbids maintenance of a standing military, although successive governments have interpreted the document as permitting the existence of forces for self-defense.
Koizumi, like his LDP predecessors over the past decade, has already stretched the boundaries of that interpretation, most recently by deploying troops to help rebuild Iraq -- the first such dispatch since the end of World War Two.
FADING PACIFISM, DEVILISH DETAILS
Talk of revising Article Nine is no longer the taboo it once was. Only the tiny Communist and Social Democratic parties, which together won only 16 seats, say the clause should be inviolate.
"There is no real support for the Social Democrat argument that revising Article Nine paves the path to war," said Yasunori Sone, a political science professor at Keio University in Tokyo.
Frustrated by constraints on Japanese military cooperation with the United States and other allies, the LDP is already working on its draft of a new constitution.
Revisions outlined last month state that Japan should possess a military not only to defend itself but to play a greater role in global security. However, in a bid to alleviate concerns over a resurgence of militarism, the draft also states that overseas deployments should be part of international cooperation.
The long-ruling party has said it planned to unveil a final draft in November to mark the 50th anniversary of its founding.
The main opposition Democratic Party, which suffered a trouncing in Sunday's election, has also said it will pull together its own proposals, but internal divisions mean progress has been slight so far.
A failure to detail their version of a new constitution would backfoot the Democrats if the LDP makes revision a key focus of a July 2007 election for the upper house, analysts said.
"The constitution will be a focus in 2007," Sone said.
"There could even be a double election for both houses, cast as a referendum on constitutional revisions."
Hurdles, however, remain to enactment.
Revisions need to be approved by two-thirds of the lawmakers in both houses of parliament and then by a simple majority of voters in a national referendum, but a new law is needed to spell out the procedures for the public vote.
Proposals for a new constitution could also run into trouble over the sticky question of the role of the upper house.
Critics question whether the upper chamber, which cannot be dissolved and whose members serve six-year terms, should be able to reject legislation approved by the lower house.
It was an upper house rejection of postal privatization bills that prompted Koizumi to call the September 11 lower house poll.
