Most Japanese voters wish Abe would get on with fixing the economy rather than messing with the constitution.
Historically, the 1947 constitution was surrounded in controversy because it was drafted under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur when Japan was under US-led occupation. But the Japanese mainstream came to embrace it and continues to celebrate the liberal political ideals that it upholds — sovereignty of the people, respect for human rights, and the renunciation of war.
The pre-war Meiji constitution vested sovereignty in the emperor, whereas the 1947 constitution vests sovereignty in the people, including for the first time universal suffrage for women. The Meiji constitution qualified rights within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to citizen’s duties as subjects. The 1947 constitution emphasises human rights, the equality of all before the law and non-discrimination on the basis of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin. The Meiji constitution left open the door for the military to hijack Japan’s political system and go down its disastrous warpath. The 1947 constitution’s Article 9 peace clause renounces war and ‘the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes’.
Right-wing movements, including the right-wing factions of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) now led by Abe, have long held ambitions to revise the constitution. Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, insisted that the LDP include constitutional revision as a founding objective of the party in 1955, lamenting the mistaken policies of the occupation authorities and the constitution for ‘the weakening of the nation’ with ‘the unwarranted suppression of the ideal of the state and patriotism and excessive fragmentation of the powers of the state’.
On becoming prime minister in 1957, Kishi initiated a research commission on the constitution. But he was forced to resign three years later, before the delivery of the commission’s findings, after his government rammed through a revision to the US–Japan Security Treaty while locking opposition lawmakers out of the Diet during the vote. Since then the LDP has prioritised rapid economic growth, which saw Japan overtake West Germany to become the second largest economy in the world in 1967. When Kishi’s commission presented its report in 1964, then-prime minister Hayato Ikeda shelved it to avoid antagonising public opinion.
It was not until the 1991 Gulf War — when Article 9 prevented Japan from making a boots-on-the-ground contribution to that conflict — that questions about constitutional revision began to re-emerge. In 2007, Abe passed a law during his first stint as prime minister setting out the process by which the necessary national referendum for constitutional revision could take place. And after the July 2016 upper house election, parties in favour of some kind of constitutional revision came to hold a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Japanese Diet. For the first time, revisionists now have the potential to put forward ideas on which they can agree in a national referendum on constitutional change.
As Yuki Tatsumi explains, the controversy about constitutional change is about Article 9. Most Japanese see Article 9 as ‘a symbol of Japan’s postwar resolve to never again go down the path of militarism’. Many supporters view any constitutional changes as ‘the beginning of a slippery slope that will turn Japan back to its militarist past’. At the same time, others argue that ‘strictly upholding Article 9 hamstrings Japan’s ability to adequately defend itself from security threats in a world that is increasingly interconnected…They argue that there ought to be a way for Japan to preserve the spirit of Article 9 while ensuring that the nation can still meet its national security needs’.
Still, revision of Article 9 appears to be off the table in the short-term for three reasons.
First, as Tatsumi argues, ‘after the security-related bills were passed in September 2015, Abe and his government lost justification to rush the debate on constitutional revision in the short-term’. With the ability to exercise limited forms of collective self-defence, concerns about US–Japan alliance cooperation, such as in the event of a contingency surrounding the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands or North Korea, appear to have been resolved.
Second, as Ben Ascione suggests, forging an agreement with Komeito, the LDP’s junior coalition partner which brands itself as ‘the opposition within the government’, will also be no easy task. Support for revision of Article 9 would seriously undermine Komeito’s loyal base of support from the pacifist Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai. The electoral cooperation agreement with Komeito that helps keep many LDP lawmakers in office makes Komeito too important for the LDP to cut adrift.
Finally, there is distrust of Abe’s ultimate intentions given the links of his government to right-wing groups such as Nippon Kaigi and the historical revisionist worldview to which they are predisposed. This was illustrated most recently by the Moritomo Gakuen scandal.
For now, the Abe government seems more likely to prioritise other areas. As Toshiya Takahashi explains, ‘issues up for debate…this year include election reform, the revision of conditions for dissolution of the Diet, the relationship between the central and local governments and suspension of the constitution in national emergencies’. These areas all demonstrate ‘the LDP’s desire for strong state control’. For instance, ‘in natural disasters, war or other similar crises, the LDP view is that private property should be able to be commandeered and freedom of speech restricted for public order or national security purposes. In the LDP’s draft constitution, this suspension (of these rights) would be allowed by administrative orders from the executive’. The current revision debate, Takahashi argues, therefore constitutes ‘a silent challenge against freedoms espoused by the 1947 constitution’.
As this critical debate takes place Japan’s political opposition has gone missing in action. Gerald Curtis explains in our lead essay this week that the ‘opposition is weaker than at any point since the end of the Second World War’. Because the opposition Democratic Party (DP) is made up of moderate conservatives forced to ‘coexist with politicians who come from a Socialist Party background and depend on the support of labour unions’, it ‘cannot make up its mind whether it is a second conservative party that offers moderate alternatives to LDP policies or a “progressive” party that stands on the other side of an ideological divide’. The DP leader Renho ‘comes across as little more than a whinger’ who ‘complains about a lot without offering any plausible alternatives’.
Since the DP ‘does not have a clear idea of what policies it wants to propose to the public, it tries to define them in terms of what it thinks the public wants that the LDP is not delivering…But an ambivalent public does not want to support an ambivalent political party’.
‘One-party dominance, especially when the LDP is as tightly controlled by the prime minister as it is now, is unhealthy for the operation of a democratic political system’, Curtis concludes.
The consequences of an historically weak opposition could be deep and long-lasting given that the government is preparing to steer the country through a reform of the fundamental legal principles on which the Japanese state has been founded over the past seventy years. It’s to be hoped that the LDP will continue to uphold the liberal democratic institutions enshrined in the present constitution which have served Japan so well over these years.
The EAF Editorial Group is comprised of Peter Drysdale, Shiro Armstrong, Ben Ascione, Ryan Manuel, Amy King and Jillian Mowbray-Tsutsumi and is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.