chapter from “Renunciation of War” to “National Security.” It proposes amending
Section 1 of Article 9 in order to constitutionalize the SDF and adding a new
Section 2 on national defense and international peace co-operation.
The draft provides in Section 1 that “in order to defend the peace and inde-
pendence of our country and to protect the safety of the country and its citizens,
the Self-Defense Military, which is to be commanded by the Prime Minister as
commander-in-chief, should be established.” The new draft thus officially
renames the SDF and explicitly refers to the maintenance of a “self-defense
military.” This change is of interest because it would mark the first time since
the end of the Second World War that Japan has referred to its own armed forces
as a military.
However, we can find more important changes in Sections 2 and 3. The draft
provides in Section 2 that “in order to perform activities to fulfill the duties under
the preceding section, the Self-Defense Military must be subject to Diet approval
and other necessary control.” It also provides in Section 3 that
the Self-Defense Military is authorized to perform, as defined by law,
international co-operative activities in order to secure the peace and
security of the international society and activities to protect public
order and to protect the lives and safety of citizens in times of emer-
gency, in addition to activities permitted under section 1.
These changes allow Japan to participate actively with the United States and the
UN in various international military and peacekeeping endeavors.
However, constitutional revision is not the only route conservative politicians
should take to overcome the limits to militaristic action imposed by the CLB. There
is another route, which is to increase political pressure on the CLB to change its
interpretation of Article 9. In the past, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who, on
August 15 , 1985 , was the first postwar prime minister to visit Yasukuni Shrine in his
official capacity, organized a private advisory panel to investigate whether the
official visit and worship would be constitutional after he was met with some
resistance from the CLB. The advisory panel concluded that an official visit would
not violate the Constitution, and the CLB was forced to change its former guide-
lines prohibiting Cabinet ministers from participating in Shinto rites.^31
In April 2007 , Prime Minster Shinzo Abe established a prime minister’s advisory
panel to examine the question whether to revise the current interpretation of the
Constitution in order to permit Japan to engage in certain specified collective self-
defense operations. While the Abe government continued to advance the agenda
for constitutional reform to amend Article 9 , the appointment of this panel of
experts to reinterpret Article 9 was an effort to establish “an alternative path to
constitutional change as a hedge against the possible failure of the amendment
(^31) Samuels, “Politics, security policy, and Japan’s Cabinet Legislation Bureau,” p. 4.