becoming a symbolic head of state), parliamentary government, human rights and
judicial review. The distinctive feature of this 1946 constitution is its Article 9 ,
the ‘pacifism’ provision on the renunciation of war. With no single amendment
since its enactment, this constitution is now one of the oldest surviving
constitutions in the contemporary world. And it has been fully put into practice,
providing a paradigmatic example of a country progressing from HC (under the
Meiji Constitution, moving, however, to a completely ‘fake constitution’ in Sartori’s
sense in the 1930 s) to GC, though doubt has been expressed whether Japan would
have achieved this transition ‘without the shock of losing the Pacific War
and without massive Occupation support for Japan’s liberal forces’.^79 Sakaguchi’s
chapter in this volume discusses various attempts and proposals to amend the
constitution, particularly Article 9 , partly motivated by the Liberal Democratic
Party’s view that it was imposed on Japan while it was still under American
occupation immediately after the war. In my view, these attempts demonstrate
that the constitution has indeed been taken seriously in Japan. Sakaguchi also
illustrates the roles of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau (which he describes as a
quasi-constitutional court) and the Supreme Court in interpreting the Japanese
constitution. It seems that there is at least a moderate degree of constitutional
activism (DCA) in contemporary Japan.
Korea. In Korea, once a tributary state of China, the Cho-sen dynasty ( 1392 – 1910 )
came to an end with the Japanese annexation of Korea after Japan’s victories in its
wars with China ( 1895 ) and Russia ( 1905 ). The Korean people experienced colonial
Japanese rule of a highly authoritarian nature until the end of the Second World
War, when Korea became divided into the Republic of Korea in the south and the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. North Korea has been under
one-man rule through a communist party – the Korea Workers’ Party – to this day.
Although the constitution is basically Stalinist in style and orientation, the
legitimacy of the regime under Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un is largely based
on ‘dynastic succession’ from Kim Il-sung, the founder of the regime. North Korea’s
constitution and its various amendments exemplify what Loewenstein calls the
‘semantic constitution’, because they do provide information about the formal
structure of the North Korean state and its ideology. Yoon’s chapter in this volume
shows how successive changes to this constitution reveal the ideological evolution
of the regime, such as the gradual de-emphasis on Marxism–Leninism and
communism and the introduction of the indigenous ideology of Juche (self-
reliance) and subsequently ofsongun(military first), shifts in economic policy
(from strict communism to a certain degree of openness to foreign investment),
and modifications of the governmental structure (such as the increasing concen-
tration of political power in the National Defence Commission and its chairman).
(^79) Lawrence W. Beer,Human Rights Constitutionalism in Japan and Asia(Folkestone:
Global Oriental, 2009 ), p. 168.