Two constitutional scholars who this month rekindled debate over security reforms have restated their assessment of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's security bills as unconstitutional.
They slammed his reinterpretation of the war-renouncing Constitution, and one of them mocked the ruling party for slurs against his credibility.
If the administration's official reading of the Constitution is changed as arbitrarily as Abe did it, "the role of the Constitution to limit political power would almost evaporate," Yasuo Hasebe, a professor at Waseda University, told a joint news conference in Tokyo at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.