Much will be at stake in the July 10 Upper House election, whose campaign effectively kicked off as the 150-day regular Diet session closed Wednesday. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is calling the triennial Upper House race, in which half the chamber's 242 seats come up for grabs, a popular verdict on his 3½-year-old Abenomics policies — along with the decision he announced this week to postpone hiking the consumption tax to 10 percent by 30 months to October 2019.
It will also be the first nationwide election since his administration's contentious security legislation, which lifted the government's long-standing ban on Japan engaging in collective self-defense and significantly expanded the scope for Self-Defense Force missions overseas, was enacted last year amid sharply divided public opinion and an outcry from scholars and opposition parties that the legislation violates the war-renouncing Constitution. And depending on the outcome of the Upper House election, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, with the help of its allies, may for the first time secure a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the Diet — a condition necessary to initiate a constitutional amendment for approval by a national referendum.
Voters need to fully recognize the issues at stake and the implications of the ballots they cast five weeks from now.