I expect that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will use the murders of two Japanese hostages by Islamic State terrorists as a trigger to accelerate departure from what he calls Japan's "postwar regime" — an agenda he has pushed for the past several years. Right after the Islamic State incident, he said "Japan has changed. From now on, I won't let (terrorists) lay a finger on the Japanese."

Before Abe began pushing his agenda, Japan was a country that, under the Constitution's war-renouncing Article 9, prohibited the use of force overseas except as a means of self-defense. It was a country that sought negotiated solutions to terrorist incidents targeting Japanese citizens, based on the idea that human lives outweigh the Earth.

I believe that Abe had actually wanted to declare that from now on Japan would not hesitate to use force if necessary to protect Japanese citizens and would be ready to accept the loss of lives as a consequence.