Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday that Japan's security policies, including its exclusively defensive posture, would "basically remain the same" if the Constitution is revised as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed last week.
Suga's remark indicates Abe is backing away from a radical constitutional revision proposed by his Liberal Democratic Party in 2012, in an apparent maneuver to lower the political hurdles to his long-held ambition to revise the pacifist postwar Constitution.
The LDP's 2012 draft would allow Japan to use military force in a more aggressive way, including the full-fledged exercise of the right to collective self-defense and participation in United Nations-authorized military operations as defined under the U.N. Charter.