The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito have started talks over the Abe administration's bid to scrap the government's traditional interpretation of the Constitution that Japan cannot exercise the right to collective self-defense. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to allow the nation to be able to use force to counter an attack on a country with close ties with Japan even if Japan itself is not directly under attack. New Komeito should not accept Abe's initiative because it represents an effort to discard — without any Diet discussions — a constitutional interpretation that was established through Diet debates over decades and a 1981 Cabinet decision that Japan cannot exercise the right to collective self-defense.
The Abe-led LDP is trying to win over New Komeito by saying that even after the constitutional interpretation is reversed, Japan will exercise the right to collective self-defense only in a limited way. The Abe administration reportedly plans to make it clear that Japan will limit the Self Defense Forces' activities within Japan's territorial waters and international waters, ruling out in principle the dispatch of the SDF to other countries' territories, territorial waters or territorial space.
But Abe reportedly will only announce such intentions verbally in the Diet, rather than as a documented policy. This cannot possibly serve as a brake to limit the scope of the SDF's activities because a future administration could easily adopt a new decision to expand the scope. In a nutshell, exercising the right to collective self-defense means to engage in a military action for the sake of another country. But such an interpretation cannot be derived from the Constitution's Article 9, which renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes, and does not recognize the right of belligerency of the state.