LDP, Komei, DPJ candidates call for constitutional revision

Recent surveys by news organizations show that most candidates running for the July 11 House of Councilors election, from the ruling Liberal Democratic and Komei parties to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, make clear that they are in favor of constitutional revision.

In a survey by the daily Asahi Shimbun, published in the June 25 issue, almost all LDP and Komei candidates said "yes" (either "definitely," or "preferably") to the need for constitutional changes. For DPJ respondents, 62 percent answered "Yes."

Many of the LDP and DPJ respondents cited "Article 9" as the most important item to be revised.

In a Kyodo News Agency survey published on June 21, an overwhelming majority of the LDP and Komei respondents, and 77 percent of DPJ respondents said they were in favor of constitutional revision.

In the election campaign, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro has called for the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defense. Akahata of July 4 said that this is in response to the U.S. Bush administration's demand that Japan take part in U.S. preemptive wars.

The DPJ issued an interim report on its proposal for constitutional changes shortly before the start of the Upper House election campaign, calling for the "right to self-defense" to be added to the Constitution without regard for the differentiation between "individual" and "collective" rights of self-defense. A DPJ candidate running in the Tokyo constituency openly says she is an advocate of revision of the war-renouncing Article 9. "I expect that U.S. President Bush will be reelected," she predicted.

Although most Social Democratic Party candidates expressed opposition to constitutional revision, the SDP has not changed its basic position of recognizing the need for the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and regarding the Self-Defense Forces as constitutional.

Only Japanese Communist Party candidates are definitely opposed to the attempt to remove Article 9 from the Constitution. The JCP is the only party to call for the Japan-U.S. military alliance to be abrogated because it constitutes the source of the calls for the constitutional revision and Japan's extraordinary subservience to the United States. (end)