The debate over the government-proposed security legislation is going in circles — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is reported to have so commented after the initial round of the Lower House deliberations of the contentious bills to enable Japan to engage in collective self-defense and expand the scope of Self-Defense Forces' overseas missions. The debate indeed seems to be going round and round — but that's mainly because the government has been unable to convincingly respond to key questions and doubts raised about the bills, including its contested legal grounds.
When three noted constitutional scholars invited to the Diet unanimously said the security legislation is unconstitutional, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga insisted that there are many other constitutional scholars who think otherwise. When Suga later said he knew about 10 such scholars and named three of them, he argued that it "does not matter" whether scholars of such opinion constitute a majority or a minority of constitutional scholars because it's the Supreme Court that serves as the nation's watchdog of the Constitution. Masahiko Komura, deputy president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, went on to say that Japan's peace and security in the postwar years might have been in danger if the government had listened to constitutional scholars since most of them called the SDF unconstitutional when it was launched in 1954.
Amid the charges from growing ranks of scholars who voice their doubts about the constitutionality of the bills, the government and ruling coalition members cite a 1959 Supreme Court ruling on the so-called Sunagawa Incident, in which demonstrators against the expansion of a U.S. military base in western Tokyo were arrested for trespassing on the base premises. The top court ruled that the Constitution does not deny the nation the right to take steps to defend itself, and since the ruling did not make a distinction between individual self-defense and collective self-defense, the limited use of force in collective self-defense to defend the nation under the proposed legislation is within the boundaries of the Constitution. That's the government's take of the ruling — which in fact was judging on the constitutionality of the U.S. military's presence in Japan under the security treaty and never touched on the question of collective self-defense.