On the evening of Feb. 12, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was sitting in a Michelin three-star sushi bar in Tokyo's Ginza with an unusual group of politicians, sipping the Dassai brand of sake made in his native Yamaguchi Prefecture.
Flanking him were Shigeyuki Tomita, chairman of the Lower House Economy and Industry Committee, and Kazuyoshi Akaba, senior vice minister of economy, trade and industry, both of New Komeito, the junior partner in the coalition government led by Abe's Liberal Democratic Party. Also present were Hiroyuki Arai, head of the New Renaissance Party, a minor party, who arranged the meeting, and Takaya Imai, the prime minister's executive secretary.
The main purpose of that meeting was to let Abe and Tomita exchange their views, close on the heels of a heated debate that took place earlier in the day at a Lower House Budget Committee meeting on Abe's pet theme of enabling Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense simply by changing the long-standing government interpretation of the Constitution.