Constitutional Revision: No Longer If, But When

Debate: Commentary (February 10, 2004)

Ayako DOI (Editor, Japan Digest)

When former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro ran in the first Lower House election held under the postwar Constitution in 1947, he drove around his Gunma district on a bicycle with a flag stuck up from his back just like a samurai going into battle. The slogan on the flag called for jishu kempo, or rejection of the constitution that had been handed down by the U.S. Occupation a few months earlier. But during a political career that spanned more than five decades, his idea -- the reason he sought office -- never came up in the Diet for discussion, much less for a vote. For half a century, it was an outlandish dream, tucked deep inside the heads of conservative politicians who remembered the days when Japan was a power with which to be reckoned.

Given that history, it is ironic that now, after Nakasone has been forcibly retired by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro (who is a strong advocate of constitutional revision), the issue is high on the agenda of every major party -- even the pacifist Komeito and Social Democrats. The way things are going, it's likely that 2004 will be the year Japan takes its first real steps down that road.

LDP Diet Affairs Committee Chairman Nakagawa Hidenao opened the gate by promising in his New Year press conference that he would send legislation to the Diet by spring to set up a process to rewrite the constitution. Democratic Party President Kan Naoto followed up by declaring that he would start a discussion on the subject in his party so it could produce its own draft revisions by 2006. Welcoming Kan to his playing field, Koizumi said he looks forward to working with the DPJ to make the revision a reality. "I never thought the DPJ would be so proactive," he exulted.

Koizumi's public overture to the largest opposition party made his coalition partner, Komeito, feel like a wife watching her husband as he was lured away by a mistress. Komeito security expert Akamatsu Masao nagged Koizumi about it in the Diet earlier this month, saying "The prime minister talks about common beliefs between LDP and DPJ... How can you not even mention your coalition partner?" A few days later, the pacifist party dropped its reservations about fiddling with the constitution, and announced it will publish an "opinion" on the subject this fall. "There will be no taboos, including the issue of Article 9," Komeito President Kanzaki Takenori told reporters. Calling Komeito's shift "historic," former Foreign Minister Nakayama Taro, who heads a Lower House panel on the constitution, remarked, "Honestly I never thought this day would come."

The constitution requires approval of two third of each house of the Diet before a revision can be presented to voters, who must give it majority approval in a national referendum. Among them, LDP, DPJ, and Komeito hold 95 percent of the seats in the Lower House, and 200 of the 247 in the upper chamber -- so changing the 1947 basic law handed down by the U.S. Occupation is no longer impossible, if they can agree on what it should say.

Lest it fade into irrelevancy, even the Social Democratic Party, whose raison d'etre has been goken, or protection of the constitution, decided just last week to create a "study group" on the subject. Former President Doi Takako, regarded as the goddess of goken, reluctantly told her colleagues, "We aren't aiming for a revision... but we must study to be able to contribute to the discussions" in the Nakayama panel.

Behind the rush to get on the kaiken (constitutikaikenonal revision) bandwagon is a clear shift in public opinion over the last year or so. Recent polls indicate that a majority of Japanese now support revising the constitution one way or another. That was confirmed in spades when the voters defeated SDP and Communist candidates wholesale in last November's Lower House ballot. Both parties had adamantly opposed changing a single word in the constitution. SDP President Fukushima Mizuho lamented that young voters these days don't even understand the word goken.

Accelerating the shift is the ongoing Diet debate about whether the government is violating the constitution by sending Self Defense Forces troops to Iraq. A lot of Japanese think Koizumi is walking out to the edge of the law when he says the deployment is justified by the mutual security treaty with the U.S. and the preamble to the constitution, which calls for international cooperation. On both sides of the controversy over Iraq, there is a strong sense that Japan has come to the limit of expanding its military roles overseas by simply re-interpreting the constitution each time a conflict arises that requires deployment of its troops. Those who worry about escalating military activism would spell out clearly what the forces can and cannot do, and supporters would rather rewrite the! constitution so it says openly that Japan may maintain a military to defend itself. "The time will come, when we should call our (self defense) forces a military, and give it the honor and place it deserves in the constitution," Koizumi told the Diet.

To be sure, agreeing to revise the constitution is one thing, while agreeing on how to change it is quite another. Komeito and the SDP would keep, or even strengthen, the Article 9 renunciation of military power in resolving international conflicts, and insert guarantees for new kinds of civil liberties such as protection of privacy and the right to live in clean environment. There are still many who would obstinately resist fiddling with Article 9 even in the LDP and the DPJ. But from the way public opinion shifted dramatically in support of the SDF deployment in Iraq once the troops were on the ground, a fait accompli clearly works in favor of advocates for change.

In a recently published analysis on the role of diplomacy in the 1930s, former Foreign Ministry official Ogura Kazuo concluded that antiwar politicians and bureaucrats failed to put a brake on Japan's slide into World War II because they tried to influence the policy of the militarists from within, rather than denouncing it outright at the risk of being cast aside. It seems that Komeito and SDP are about to make the same mistake in the current debate on the constitution. In a society where conformity and harmony are so important as they are in Japan, it's hard to restrain a shift once it starts to happen. As he left the Diet reluctantly last fall, Nakasone said it was particularly painful to be left out at a time when his lifelong dream was about to come true.

(Posted here with the permission of Pacific Forum CSIS)

Japan crosses the Rubicon

Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times

HONOLULU -- Japan has crossed the Rubicon, with surprisingly little opposition at home or abroad, by starting to dispatch armed soldiers to Iraq in their first deployment to a combat zone since World War II.

In a departure ceremony in northern Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Defense Agency Director General Shigeru Ishiba presented the colors, or flags, to a detachment of 500 soldiers standing rank on rank in black berets, camouflaged battle uniforms and black boots.

Their commanding officer, Col. Yasushi Kiyota, told his troops, their families and the dignitaries: "We shall overcome all obstacles, no matter how difficult, and all return safely." Those listening said he emphasized the last point. The Japanese have been tasked to help reconstruct Iraq's damaged and obsolete roads, power plants, water works, schools and hospitals.

The ceremony was televised and evidently seen all over Japan where it was greeted with complicated feelings. Japanese parents were worried, as are all parents when their sons and, in this case, a few daughters, are sent in harms way. Japan has sent perhaps a dozen peacekeeping and humanitarian missions abroad in as many years but only after most danger has passed.

In addition, say Japanese who watched the ceremony and related events, there was evidence of a quiet pride that Japan has begun to shed the cocoon of pacifism in which it has wrapped itself for nearly 60 years and started to accept responsibilities and risks in the international arena.

A soldier addressing the departure formation spoke of representing "our country of Bushido," the way of the warrior that was honorable in the days of yore but was corrupted by the militarists of prewar Japan. In Hawaii, a citizen of the Saipan, the island occupied by Japan before and during World War II, approved of Japan "paying back for some of the things they did then."

Japanese opposition politicians protested, but without much fervor, the dispatch of armed soldiers, contending that it violated Article IX of the constitution, which prohibits the use of armed force to settle disputes. About 4,000 protesters rallied in Hibiya Park in Tokyo with banners: "We don't need a war." In a land where demonstrations of tens of thousands have been fashioned, kabuki style, into an art form, a protest of 4,000 is not worth the ink it takes to print this.

Abroad, China and South Korea, which nurture historical animosities toward Japan, appear to have taken the deployment calmly; most press reports have been limited to factual accounts of the departure. A Filipino military officer, whose nation was brutally conquered by Japan in 1942, said in Hawaii: "It's OK even though we have not totally forgotten what they did."

In a round-table discussion at the East-West Center, a research and educational institute in Hawaii, six scholars specializing in Asia were unanimous in saying they expected little criticism of Japan over the deployment. "Too many people in Asia," said one, "have too many other things on their minds."

North Korea, which is at odds with Japan on several scores, was among the few to be openly critical: "This is a prelude," said Rodong Sinmun, an official newspaper, "to the overseas aggression of the Japanese militarists, which may bring immeasurable misfortune and disasters to humankind again in the 21st century."

Ever since Julius Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon River in northern Italy in 49 B.C., that passage has come to be an emblem for decisions from which there is no turning back. Japan, which plans to send about 1,000 troops to Iraq in coming weeks, has passed its point of no return.

What of the future? A research study by Colonel William E. Rapp of the U.S. Army War College notes: "Japan is in the midst of a fundamental re-examination of its security policy." He concludes, however, that "Japan remains deeply ambivalent toward security expansion" and suggests that "Japan will continue slowly and incrementally to remove the shackles on its military security policy."

Some years ago, a Japanese whose name is lost in foggy memory, wrote: "Japanese mothers must understand that they are not the only ones who do not wish to send their sons off to die in battle." Since Iraq is a dangerous place for Americans, Australians, British, Koreans, Poles and everyone else, not to say the Iraqi people themselves, the Japanese are likely to suffer casualties there.

Then Japanese mothers, sadly, will experience, for the first time in six decades, the profound sorrow of mothers everywhere who have lost their sons in hostile action.

Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.

U.S. plans consolidation of Pacific forces

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times

HONOLULU -- U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is planning a sweeping revision of the command apparatus through which American military forces are controlled in Asia in an effort to make them more responsive to contingencies from the Korean Peninsula to Australia.

Military officers said the revision would take place primarily in South Korea and Japan, but would affect U.S. deployments throughout the Pacific Command's area of responsibility -- which runs from the U.S. West Coast across the Pacific and Indian oceans to the shores of Africa. This command, from its headquarters overlooking the naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, controls 300,000 military people and is the largest unit of the U.S. armed forces.

Among the command elements that will most likely be dismantled in South Korea are the United Nations Command (UNC), United States Forces Korea (USFK), the Combined Forces Command (CFC) and the Eighth U.S. Army.

In Japan, United States Forces Japan will disappear, but a new operational corps headquarters led by a three-star lieutenant general will be set up.

In addition, the position of the four-star general who commands the UNC, USFK, and CFC will be abolished. At the same time, a new billet for an army general will be established at the headquarters of the U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, Hawaii. He will take control of army forces in the Pacific region now under the command of a three-star lieutenant general.

The officers said this shakeup is part of Rumsfeld's wider plan to "transform" the Pentagon and the armed forces. In this case, they said, the intent is to eliminate crisscrossing chains of command that are legacies of World War II, the occupation of Japan, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam and the Cold War.

"When we get through," said one officer, "it will be seamless." They said many details, including the timing of the moves, remained to be decided but that the process has started. Allied governments in Asia, particularly in Seoul and Tokyo, will be consulted before final decisions are made.

Besides increasing the efficiency of U.S. forces, the revisions are intended to appeal to South Korean nationalism and to tamp down rising anti-Americanism. The U.S. and South Korea have already agreed that the U.S. headquarters will move from a congested area in Seoul to a new site about 120 km south. The 2nd Infantry Division will also move from the heavily populated area north of Seoul to new bases further south.

Disbanding the Combined Forces Command is also intended to lessen South Korean complaints that it diminishes their nation's sovereignty. At present, it controls South Korean and U.S. forces but is led by a U.S. general with a South Korean general as second in command. Many South Koreans have argued that since it is their country and they furnish the bulk of the forces a South Korean should command.

"This would reduce the misperception that the U.S. controls the Korean military," said an officer. It might also blunt the North Korean charge that South Korean forces are lackeys of the Americans.

The corps headquarters in Japan will likely take operational control of the 2nd Division and other army combat formations in South Korea to meld them into one operational force. The U.S. has 37,000 troops in South Korea, about 17,000 of them in the 2nd Division. Its mission will focus less on the defense of South Korea and more on deploying to meet threats elsewhere in Asia.

The corps commander, most likely to be posted at Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo, will be on a level with the navy's 7th Fleet Commander, whose flagship's home port is Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and with the Air Force's 5th Air Force, with headquarters at Yokota Air Base, west of Tokyo. Thus U.S. forward operational commands will be bunched in Japan.

Having a four-star general leading the Army of the Pacific is intended to enhance the Pacific Command's ability to influence the armies of Asia. In most Asian nations, Japan being an exception, the army as an institution is politically and economically powerful. That gives the American commander in the Pacific region a large political-military portfolio in his job description.

Asian counterparts, many of whom are sensitive to protocol and want to be seen as equals, will more easily receive a visiting American general with four stars on his shoulders than a general with three stars -- or the four-star navy admiral who heads the Pacific Command.

Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.