Yomiuri has released the results of its annual poll on constitution revision and has found that once again a majority — a slight one, 51.6% — favors revising Japan's constitution. This marks a nine-point increase over last year's poll. Opposition to revision fell from 43.1% to 36.5%.Interestingly, majorities among both self-described LDP supporters and DPJ …
Tag: Article 9
Asking old questions anew
(This is the second post discussing George Packard's Protest in Tokyo; see the first here.)When I last discussed Packard, I spoke about how his exploration of Japanese thinking behind the first US-Japan security treaty revealed that independence was the dominant theme in Japanese foreign policy thinking throughout the 1950s. Independence has, of course, been a …
Reading Packard on the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty
On my way back to Japan, I began reading Protest in Tokyo, a classic account of the crisis surrounding the approval of the 1960 revision of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty by George Packard, president of the United States-Japan Foundation.As Prime Minister Abe forges ahead in his campaign to abandon the postwar regime, I think …
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The revisionists ascendant
Western commentators who only intermittently pay attention to Japan seem to be befuddled by the Japanese constitution. They seem to have a hard time grasping the difficulties associated with changing it, the totemic significance it has been made to bear by both pacifists and revisionists — and thus tend to assume that revision is easy, …
No gaiatsu on revision
Oh, to be the "grand strategist" author of best-selling books — and to be the peddler of a strategic concept that purports to explain everything.Clearly, that's the ticket to being able to get away with writing blog posts like this one by Tom Barnett: "Japan will and must un-pacify." In a single thirty-word post, Dr. …
What manner of constitution debate will Japan have?
In the wake of yesterday's passage of the national referendum bill, each major daily unsurprisingly featured an editorial looking forward to the next three years of debate on revision.In the left-wing Asahi Shimbun, the mood was, unsurprisingly, despondent about the passage of the bill. At the same time, though, the tone was defiant, taking up …
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Japan’s constitution turns sixty
As Japan celebrates Constitution Day, marking the anniversary of the promulgation of the postwar constitution, the Abe Cabinet has renewed its push to revise the constitution — read Article 9 of the constitution — on the heels of bilateral meetings with the US that pointed to a more globally active US-Japan alliance.In Washington, Defense Minister …
Collective self-defense offensive
In the past day, the Abe Cabinet has been on the offensive on the question of the review of the prohibition on the right of collective self-defense.Yesterday, Prime Minister Abe said at a press conference, "As the era changes, I want to have a debate about how the constitution should be interpreted."At the Diet, controversial …
Friction in the coalition?
The Mainichi Shimbun reports in a brief article that the New Komeito Party, the LDP's coalition partner, wants to maintain clauses one and two of Article 9 and does not seek the ability to exercise the right of collective self-defense.Surely a disagreement within the LDP-Komeito coalition on constitution revision and the related question of collective …
Support for constitution revision falls
At least that's what the latest Yomiuri Shimbun poll on constitution revision revealed.The results of the poll should serve as a reminder to the Abe Cabinet, Japan's neighbors, and the world at large that the politics of Japan's normalization are far from simple.While the survey has shown a consistent plurality in favor of constitution revision …
Tobias S. Harris 