As questions over the legal foundation for his proposed security legislation refuse to die, there is a point of argument that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe frequently comes back to — the government can reinterpret the Constitution to shape its security policies to respond to changing international circumstances. When constitutional scholars charged during recent Lower House debate that the legislation is unconstitutional because it can't be explained within the framework of the government's past interpretation of the Constitution, Abe said politicians would be failing to do their duty if they turn a blind eye to the international situation of the times and cling to the government's conventional interpretation of the supreme law.
Critics of the security bills and Abe's Cabinet decision in July last year, on which the bills are based, accuse the administration of single-handedly changing the government's long-standing position that the Constitution forbids Japan from engaging in acts of collective self-defense. Proponents of the bills, on the other hand, say the government's interpretation of the Constitution, especially war-renouncing Article 9, has changed over time since its inception shortly after Japan's defeat in World War II.
Often cited is the statement made in 1946 by Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida as the Diet deliberated the draft of the postwar Constitution. He declared that Japan under the new Constitution renounces war even as a means of self-defense. As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s and the nation established the Self-Defense Forces in 1954, it became the established government position that the Constitution does not deny Japan the right to defend itself. Meanwhile, the government has long explained that Japan holds the inherent right to collective self-defense, but that the Constitution, which "renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes," forbids Japan from exercising that right.