Japan Press Weekly

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2014 May 7 - 13 [POLITICS]

Defend pacifistic postwar Japan built by people’s tireless efforts: JCP

Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Yamashita Yoshiki on May 3 published the following statement on the occasion of the 67th anniversary of Japan’s postwar Constitution:

The Constitution Day this year took place amid a mounting public call for the Constitution and constitutionalism to be protected from the Abe Cabinet’s maneuver to entitle the country to exercise the right to collective self-defense by trampling on the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution for the purpose of remaking Japan to become capable of fighting wars abroad.

The use of the right to collective self-defense means that Japan, even if not under attack, can use armed force abroad. Japan dispatched its Self-Defense Forces in the U.S. retaliatory war against Afghanistan in 2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. At that time, they were unable to enter battlefields and use force because of the constitutional “brake” being applied. Allowing the use of the right to collective self-defense, however, will disable this brake. The country may send young people to combat situations to kill or be killed. It is impermissible for the government to change the existing constitutional interpretation and trample on Article 9.

The Abe administration claims that it will limit the use of the collective self-defense right to a bare minimum. Once Japan gives itself this right, which successive governments have refrained from acquiring in light of Article 9, it will be free to expand the scope and the scale of military actions with U.S. forces.

The Abe Cabinet has already spent 25 trillion yen on military spending in the past five years and has compiled a plan to convert the SDF into a war-fighting military. Prime Minister Abe is also preparing to create a system to mobilize the public for wars abroad. As preliminary steps toward this, his government forcibly enacted the state secrecy law and is now strengthening state intervention in and control over education and news organizations such as NHK. However, this is undermining the international trust in Japan as a “pacifistic nation” established by people’s tireless efforts after the end of WWII. In addition, Japan will sour relations with Asian countries which in the past Japan invaded and will inevitably be isolated from the international community working for a peaceful world.

Against the Abe Cabinet’s move, public criticism with a sense of crisis is rapidly increasing, and many people have begun standing up against the moves. Many opinion polls show that the majority of people think it unnecessary to change the conventional constitutional interpretation to equip Japan with the right to collective self-defense. An increasing number of people express objections to changing Article 9 as well. A wide range of people, including former executives of the Liberal Democratic Party, a constitutional scholar who advocates constitutional revision, successive heads of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, and a former cabinet secretary who was directly involved in overseas dispatches of the SDF, one after another began calling for defending constitutionalism and opposing interpretational changes in the Constitution.

The Abe’s scheme has woken up people’s awareness for the need to maintain peace and democracy. It will be possible to defeat his machinations if grass-root activities and movements of various strata of people in various fields unite with each other. The JCP calls for a nationwide concerted effort to resist the attempt to turn Japan into a war-capable nation and to go back to the past era of militarism. The JCP once again expresses its determination to take a lead in this effort.