With the expected passage of a bill setting procedures for a referendum to revise the Constitution, the Japanese people are going to have to think carefully about what sort of changes they want made to the charter. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has staked his political career on revising the Constitution, but citizens seem unsure as to whether or not they want to scrap it.
Just as Abe's Liberal Democratic Party has managed to keep its majority for half a century because people think you don't fix something that ain't broke, they also figure you don't need to change a Constitution that's kept them out of war since the last one. A Kyodo News survey found that twice as many respondents want to keep the war-renouncing Article 9 as those who want to scrap it. And 54.6 percent said that they want to retain the Constitution's ban on Japan's involvement in collective defense, a matter Abe wants reconsidered.
Becoming an independent military power is central to Abe's vision of a "beautiful country," but since the early 1950s Japan has lived with a contradiction: a self-defense force whose existence violates Article 9 in letter if not in spirit. Some say it should be changed to acknowledge reality, but supporters of Article 9 have a point. As long as it exists, Japanese lawmakers have to debate openly any troop dispatch. Without it, military actions become easier to initiate, but something else would have to change before Japan became a military power of any standing, namely the people's conception of what their military is for.