May 3 was Constitution Memorial Day. Since its promulgation 73 years ago, Japan's postwar Constitution has remained untouched. Many reasons for this have been cited, including the length (4,986 words compared with the median 13,630 words), its vagueness and its flexibility to handle changing circumstances. In short, amending the Constitution has been deemed unnecessary.
Yet the Liberal Democratic Party and its leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, would beg to differ. Since the party’s inception in 1955, the LDP has been dead set on revising the Constitution and adding certain elements to it. A major hurdle has been the need to obtain a two-thirds majority in the Diet and pass a national referendum. Today, the LDP and its allies do not hold a supermajority in the Upper House, making revision a difficult affair.
Even so, Abe has continued to pursue this goal. On May 3, the prime minister took part in an online forum hosted by a pro-amendment group and said there is “no wavering in my resolve to amend the Constitution.” Specifically, he spoke of the need to pass the LDP’s 2018 reform proposal, which most notably would add an emergency powers clause to give more power to the government in times of crisis and revise Article 9 — the war-renouncing clause.