AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
TOKYO: Japan will once again have a “military” in name six decades after the United States stripped the country of the right to keep armed forces, in the first revision of the post-World War II constitution presented Tuesday.
The revision will mean little practical change for Japan, which has skirted its 1947 constitution by calling its military the “Self-Defense Forces,” but marks a symbolic milestone in breaking another post-war taboo.
But the constitutional revisions risk raising tensions with neighboring countries, which accuse Japan of not atoning for its past aggression.
US occupation forces “compiled the current Japanese constitution within nine days,” said former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who led the constitutional revisions for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
“We cannot possibly say the constitution was created by the Japanese people's own hands,” Mori told party faithful at a Tokyo hotel. “Finally now the time has come for us to compile our own constitution.”
Mori formally presented the draft before a 50th anniversary celebration for the LDP, the conservative party that has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955 and won an overwhelming majority in September elections.
The constitution is nearly certain to go through parliament, with the main opposition Democratic Party also backing revision. It would then be submitted to a referendum, with opinion polls indicating it would easily pass.
The constitution maintains Japan's official pacifism, keeping a clause that says: “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”
Other than in name, Japan already has one of the world's best funded “militaries,” devoting close to five trillion yen (44 billion dollars) to defense a year. It has skirted the constitution by calling the troops the “Self-Defense Forces.”
The draft revision would keep the terminology but also use the word military.
It cuts out a paragraph in pacifist Article Nine that says “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”
Instead, the draft says: “In order to secure peace and the independence of our country as well as the security of the state and the people, military forces for self-defense shall be maintained with the prime minister of the cabinet as the supreme commander.”
In light of the revision, the LDP will also seek to create a cabinet-level defense ministry. Japan now has a “Defense Agency” which has lower status than other ministries such as foreign affairs and finance.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has tried to boost Japan's image as more than an economic power. He has deployed some 600 troops on a reconstruction mission to Iraq, the first time since 1945 that Japan has deployed soldiers to a country where fighting is under way.
Due to the pacifist constitution, the troops in Iraq with their state of the art technology have not even fired a shot and could only use force in the strictest definition of self-defense.
Koizumi swept to re-election in September by portraying the LDP — which has been in power for all but 10 months since 1955 — as a champion of reform that would break up and privatize the powerful post office monopoly.
“In this time of major changes, it is our responsibility to carry out reforms to deal with society's changes while maintaining peace,” Koizumi told the party meeting.
