Japan Press Weekly

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2016 January 13 - 19 [POLITICS]

Abe eyes right to impose dictatorship in emergency

Akahata ‘current’ column

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is seeking to revise the Constitution to one including an “emergency clause”. What he calls an “emergency” may be a foreign invasion, given that a military emergency comes at the top of the list of possible critical incidents in the Liberal Democratic Party’s 2012 draft of a new constitution. Abe’s goal is to create a structure entitling a prime minister to declare a state of emergency to suppress people’s rights in the event of war.

The Japanese Constitution renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining war potential. The late Kanamori Tokujiro, who is regarded as a “midwife” of the Constitution, said that Japan should be proud of this pacifist principle of the Constitution. “If anyone thinks it is not a good idea to do the right thing before others do, the person will never see that the right thing would become reality,” he said.

In 1946, a year after the end of WWII, a Diet session was convened to revise the Constitution of the Empire of Japan. During the Diet discussions, Kanamori, who then served as the minister in charge of the drafting of a new constitution, rejected the need for an emergency clause. He claimed that to declare a state of emergency would allow the state to disregard people’s rights for a certain period of time and that a constitution without such a clause would be preferable.

In preparing for emergencies, what should be seriously discussed is the risk of accidents at nuclear power plants, said Waseda University Professor Hasebe Yasuo. Hasebe, an expert in constitutional law, in his article in the January issue of “Sekai” magazine argued that another nuclear disaster will no longer enable Japan to have hope of recovery and that to leave NPPs as they are poses a serious risk to the country.

Taking advantage of people’s anxiety about “emergencies”, PM Abe is trying to revise the Constitution to obtain the power to impose what is tantamount to martial law on the general public. Both his intent and method to change the Constitution are outrageous.