A strong victory for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party in next month's Upper House election would spell an end to postwar pacifism and "completely change the way Japan is," according to Democratic Party leader Katsuya Okada.

"I have an extremely strong sense of crisis," Okada said in an interview with the media last Friday, referring to Abe's longtime dream of rewriting the pacifist Constitution that many nationalists see as an embarrassing legacy of the postwar Occupation.

Okada and his party are determined to stop the LDP and its kindred spirits from securing enough seats to win a two-thirds majority in the Upper House, a scenario that he says would pave the way for the first-ever revision of the 69-year-old national charter.