In light of the ongoing speculation about the probability and timing of a snap election, it is worthwhile to step back and consider structural flaws in how Japanese governments are formed.Why, after all, should Mr. Fukuda's government function on the basis of a parliamentary majority secured more than two years ago under his predecessor before …
Tag: constitution revision
Abe’s new role
Mr. Abe commented about constitution revision in an answer at a press conference at the Kantei on Thursday."For these three years, my thinking is unchanged that we must, together with the people, have a wide and deep debate about the new constitution."This was reported in a minute article on pg. 4 of Yomiuri, together with …
Viva the lifestyle restoration!
Jun Okumura gives a thorough fisking to a BBC article that completely misses what's actually going on in this election campaign. In fact, the article seems to be little more than a bundle of cliches strung together with, as Jun notes, a few illustrative anecdotes.All the BBC had to do to get this story right …
After the Yoshida Doctrine, what?
Over at Shisaku, MTC notes in a thoughtful post on the Yoshida Doctrine, "Yet even now, sixteen years down the line, the Yoshida tradeoff rules as the master narrative underpinning all discussion of Japan's security options."Yet I wonder if the Yoshida Doctrine lives on only as a function of the institutional and constitutional constraints that …
Constitutions east and west
In his Sunday interview on NHK, Prime Minister Abe reiterated the importance of constitution revision as a point of contention in next month's Upper House election.Meanwhile, in Brussels this past weekend the European Union's member states concluded a treaty that wraps up the questions that were intended to be addressed by the nixed constitution. The …
Into the realm of the symbolic
While I obviously recognize that Asahi and Yomiuri approach public affairs from drastically different perspectives, I have never thought that they were living in different worlds.Until today.In Asahi, prominently featured on the front page, was an article on a Japanese Communist Party report suggesting that a special Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces (JGSDF) unit conducted surveillance …
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 …
Continue reading Reading Packard on the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty
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, …
Gaiatsu revisited
After reading this post by Matt Dioguardi at Liberal Japan. and reading that MTC was "not thrilled" with yesterday's admittedly dyspeptic post about gaiatsu and constitution revision, I feel that it is necessary to clarify about what the US should do over the coming years as Japan debates constitution revision.Pace Matt Dioguardi, gaiatsu is not …
Tobias S. Harris 