Election victory threatens Japanese pacifism

Voters battled through a powerful storm yesterday to grant a huge mandate to Japan’s ruling coalition.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government will continue to dominate Japan’s House of Representatives. He has won two-thirds of the seats there, solidifying a “supermajority” that allows him to try to change the constitution. He hopes to use this power to turn Japan’s self-defence force into a fully-fledged military.

Abe said he needed a new mandate to tackle the “national crises” facing Japan. Just ten days before he called the election, North Korea fired its second ballistic missile across Japan.

The Japanese constitution, written by US army officers and enacted in 1947, prevents the country from having a military.

However, under pressure from the US government to stop the spread of communism in Asia, Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (SDF) were introduced in 1954.

But the troops are hampered by one crucial element: their operations are limited by the Japanese constitution, which does not recognise them as a legitimate army.

For Japanese people living in the shadow of North Korea and an increasingly powerful China, self-defence is now high on the agenda.

As Abe’s supermajority storms to power once again, should Japan leave pacifism behind and build an army?

Pax Japonica?

“Japanese ‘pacifism’ is in for an update,” argues journalist Pallavi Aiyar. We simply cannot expect Japan to follow the rules of this outdated document when its very existence is under threat from its unpredictable neighbours.

But Miyuki Nakayama, student leader of the group Public for the Future says that people are forgetting the war’s lessons. Who knows how Japan’s neighbours will react to it building an army? The decision may well make tensions in the region worse. More countries should be pacifist instead.