Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, all but certain to be the next prime minister, again expressed on Tuesday his strong ambition to revise the pacifist Constitution and maintain the right to exercise collective defense on specific occasions.
But Abe, known as a hawk on security issues, did not rule out the possibility of only changing the government's interpretation of the Constitution to achieve that goal.
The current interpretation of the Constitution prohibits the nation from exercising the U.N.-guaranteed right to collective defense.