Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called for “advanced discussions” on revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, according to the Guardian, saying the document should “reflect the demands of the times.” The remarks coincided with what the paper describes as the largest demonstrations in support of the pacifist constitution Japan has seen in a generation, with rallies held nationwide on Constitution Memorial Day. Takaichi, who took office last autumn as the country’s first female prime minister, leads a Liberal Democratic Party that has formally favoured constitutional revision since its founding in 1955 but has never in seventy years actually achieved it. The same week, she signed six bilateral agreements with Vietnam on technology, energy, and space cooperation — the kind of quiet realignment that suggests Tokyo is preparing for a post-American Pacific.
The received wisdom
The dominant Western framing treats Article 9 — the pacifist clause that renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation” and the maintenance of war potential — as one of the most precious institutional inheritances of the post-1945 order, second only to the Bonn-era German Basic Law. On this account, any move to revise it is a step away from the constraints that made post-war Japan a model rather than a menace, and Takaichi’s framing — that the constitution should “reflect the demands of the times” — is exactly the kind of language that has been used to corrode liberal constitutional protections from Hungary to Israel. The protests draw their moral force from a historical memory that runs through Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Tokyo trials, and seventy years of broadly successful self-restraint. The implicit counsel is that the burden of proof lies entirely with the revisionists, and that any change to Article 9 should be opposed pending an overwhelming demonstration of necessity.
A different read
The trouble with that framing is that the strategic environment in which Article 9 was drafted no longer exists, and the framing was never as benign as its admirers suggest. Article 9 was authored, in its essentials, by Americans — specifically by the staff of General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation headquarters, in 1946, in a context where the United States expected to provide Japan’s external security indefinitely. That bargain held, more or less, for seventy years. It is now coming apart. The same week that Takaichi made her revision pitch, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany over the next six to twelve months, in the context of an unresolved Iran war and an alliance that — as NPR has reported — is “still assessing the details.” Tokyo’s planning staff are not assessing details. They are reading the same headlines and drawing the obvious conclusion: the postwar American security guarantee, in any of its theatres, is now conditional in a way it has not been since 1947.
What Takaichi is doing is what any responsible head of government in her position would do. Japan faces a North Korean nuclear arsenal it cannot deter alone, a Chinese navy that has displaced the US Pacific Fleet in regional tonnage, and a Russia that — even diminished by the Ukraine war — retains a Pacific squadron and, more importantly, a willingness to use it. The country has already, under previous LDP governments, reinterpreted Article 9 to permit “collective self-defence,” doubled the defence budget toward 2% of GDP, and acquired counter-strike missile capability. The constitutional question is whether to align the text with the practice. Doing so honestly is, in fact, the more conservative course: the alternative is the steady accumulation of legal fictions, in which a country with one of the world’s largest “self-defence forces” pretends it has no army, and in which every successive cabinet stretches the interpretation a little further than the last. That is the road Israel walked from 1948 to 1967 with its undeclared nuclear programme, and the road the United States itself has walked under the War Powers Resolution, where successive presidents have hollowed out the original constitutional design without ever amending it.
The protesters’ moral seriousness deserves respect, and the historical memory they invoke is real. But the protest’s effective political content is the demand that Japan continue to depend on the United States for its survival while the United States is signalling, in every theatre, that this is no longer a load it intends to carry. That is not pacifism. It is delegated militarism. Takaichi’s revisionism, paradoxically, may be the more honest course — and the one that gives Japan’s Diet, rather than Pentagon planners, the final say over when and how the country fights.
What to watch
Three signals will tell the story. First, whether the LDP can secure the two-thirds Diet majority needed to put a revision to referendum — the bar that has stopped every previous attempt. Second, whether Vietnam’s deeper cooperation is followed by similar agreements with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia: a regional security architecture not centred on Washington is the actual destination. Third, whether opposition to revision consolidates around a credible alternative defence doctrine, rather than around the assumption that the 1947 settlement is still available.
— J