Japan Press Weekly

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2011 May 18 - 24 [POLITICS]

Important national agenda item used as tool for political bargaining

Akahata ‘current’ column

“We decided to submit an amendment to the budget bill right before the bill is sent to the Upper House, hoping that our proposal will be passed during the last minutes of the Lower House discussion.”

This is what former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro stated when explaining how the national budget was created in 1954 for the construction of nuclear power reactors. Nakasone, an opposition party member of the House of Representatives at that time, obtained the ruling party’s consent to his budget proposal for nuclear power stations by telling the ruling force that it cannot obtain the opposition bloc’s approval for the national budget bill if it opposes his amendment.

“That was how Japan’s nuclear power generation program was started,” boasted Nakasone. The nuclear energy program, currently with 54 reactors throughout the nation, was launched by such political maneuvering without discussion in the Diet.

“The Constitution is the most important document of Japan. Why do we have to rush (to revise it) right now?” This is the remark made by an Upper House representative of the Democratic Party of Japan two years ago when it was an opposition party. He claimed that the DPJ would not agree with taking a vote on establishing rules for the Deliberative Council on the Constitution in the House, authorized to examine drafts of constitutional revision.

However, the DPJ, now the ruling party, just recently approved the Council’s rules together with the Liberal Democratic and Komei parties. Many see that the DPJ made a compromise with the LDP for a smooth steering of the “twisted” Diet, in which the ruling bloc maintains the majority of the Lower House while the Upper House is controlled by the opposition force. In other words, the DPJ used the “most important rule of Japan” as a tool for political maneuvering.

Advocates of constitutional revision in the Diet now blame the Constitution for the delay of the government’s response to the latest natural disaster and following nuclear accident. They are dodging their responsibility by shifting the blame on the Constitution, which, they claim, lacks explicit stipulations regarding a “state of emergency”. Their group, the parliamentarian league for a new constitution, is headed by Nakasone, who is a longtime promoter of nuclear power generation and political maneuvering.