Taku Yamasaki, secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, calls for a revision to the Constitution in his book "Kempo Kaisei" (Constitutional revision). I read it with great interest because his proposal, coming as it does from the No. 2 man in the ruling party, carries weight and therefore could play an important part in the looming political debate on constitutional revision.
Simply put, I was moved by the book. This is not the work of a ghostwriter, nor is it a patchwork of secondhand knowledge and half-baked ideas. That is clear from the way it is written.
In the postscript, Yamasaki says the book is the result of intensive discussions among he and his colleagues. "We discussed it day after day, from early morning to midnight, sometimes even forgetting to eat or sleep," he recalls. Regarding matters on which they disagreed, he says he wrote down his own thoughts.