Japan Press Weekly

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2015 January 28 - February 3 [POLITICS]

JCP Inoue criticizes military-centered supplementary budget bill

Japanese Communist Party member of the House of Councilors Inoue Satoshi on January 28 made an interpellation at an Upper House plenary session, condemning the supplementary draft budget for fiscal 2014 as being military-oriented. The following is an excerpt of his statement:

In the supplementary budget bill, the government earmarks 211 billion yen in military expenses. The amount includes the costs for enhancing the capability of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and for transferring the U.S. Forces in Okinawa to Guam under the name of “economic measures”. It is unthinkable that these expenditures could bring about any benefit to local economies. The government should stop increasing the military budget while slashing social security services.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said at his New Year press conference, “The path Japan has taken as a peace-loving nation will remain unchanged.” The Abe administration, however, has been spending a lot of taxpayers’ money in purchasing combat planes and vehicles, such as F-35 stealth fighters, unmanned spy aircraft Global Hawks, Ospreys, and amphibious vehicles. This indicates that the SDF is turning into an offensive military to attack other countries.

On top of that, the government is promoting arms exports after it abandoned Japan’s three principles banning weapons exports, and is attempting to revise the Official Development Assistance Charter in order to legalize giving financial support to developing nations’ armed forces. These moves contradict Abe’s New Year remarks.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. The need now is to apply the lessons learned from Japan’s past war of aggression and protect the war-renouncing Japanese Constitution. The JCP demands that the government retract the unconstitutional Cabinet decision which lifts the ban on Japan’s use of the collective self-defense right, as well as put a stop to the work to prepare security bills based on that decision.

This year is also the 70th year following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The NPT Review Conference is scheduled to be started at the end of April.

Campaigns for the total abolition of nuclear weapons are increasing on a global scale, especially focusing on the inhumanity and cruelty of the weapons. Many A-bomb survivors, despite their advanced age, are involved in activities talking about their survival experiences both inside and outside Japan.

At the third international conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons held in Vienna in December last year, the envoy of Japan’s government said that a view reaffirmed at the session that the global community could not adequately deal with disastrous consequences following a nuclear blast is “overly pessimistic”.

This remark came from the fact that Japan has adhered to a nuclear deterrent policy and has been under the nuclear umbrella of the United States.

It is absolutely disgraceful that Japan, in spite of being the only A-bombed nation in the world, continues abstaining from voting on a UN resolution calling for starting negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC). The Abe administration should abandon its nuclear deterrent policy and actively support the UN resolution.

Past related article:
> Yamashita criticizes PM Abe for proposing anti-people 2015 budget plan [January 15, 2015]