opinion

A rally demanding the constitutional amendment to specify the existence of the Self-Defense Forces recently took place in Tokyo, Japan.

In the rally, the Japanese authorities talked about “peace” and “defence” and insisted on specifying the existence of the SDF in the constitution and deleting paragraph 2 of Article 9, which stipulates the waiver of the right to possess combat capabilities, in order to defend the country. And they stressed that it is quite weird that the constitution restricts their right to self-defence.

It is not the first time that Japan tried to revise the constitution.

Such attempt is the revelation of the deep-rooted militaristic ambition of the Japanese authorities to perfect legal and institutional mechanisms for reinvasion and its conversion into a military power.

The current Japanese constitution that came in force in 1947 renounces war forever and denies the country armed forces and the right to belligerence. The UN Charter, regarding the war criminal state of Japan as an enemy state, stipulates the responsibility to prevent new aggression by the enemy state.

However, Japan has never abandoned its militaristic ambition but pursued a path towards a military power since its defeat.

Since its advent, the Liberal Democratic Party has been tenaciously carrying out manoeuvres to legalize the building of a military power and overseas aggression, advocating a breakaway from the post-war system and the constitutional revision. It has also taken every opportunity to clamour for the alteration of constitutional interpretation in order to possess the capacity to attack enemy bases and exercise the right to collective self-defence, and even drew up and circulated a draft amendment to the constitution.

In 2015, it lifted the constitutional restriction on the scope of SDF’s activities by railroading the security-related law allowing the exercise of the right to collective self-defence and legalizing the overseas dispatch of troops. At the end of 2022, it formulated a new national security strategy, a national defence strategy and a defence programme and added to them the possession of the counterattack capacity, i.e. the capacity to attack enemy bases, so as to make it a policy.

Japan, which styled itself a “pacifist state”, though nominal, under the cloak of the current constitution, has taken off the mask and is now hell-bent on the arms buildup and the moves to become a military power.

Consequently, Japan’s organic law, stipulating the eternal renunciation of war as the exercise of state power, threat with armed forces or the use of armed forces, the denial of ground, naval and air forces and other combat capabilities to it and the disclamation of its right to belligerence, has now become a mere show.

The true intention of the Japanese authorities who are attempting to revise the nominally existing constitution is clear. It is to rush along the road of reinvasion.

As to this, even Japanese experts are lamenting that, if the constitution undergoes regressive revision, the country would be regarded as a hostile nation and subjected to rebuke and pre-emptive strikes by regional countries and would finally perish.

But such lamentation is lost on the Japanese reactionaries as they are steeped in the militaristic ambition.

Reinvasion leads to self-destruction.