By Robert Dujarric
“There is a lot more continuity than discontinuity in Japanese defense policy.”
Absent a major upset, the Japanese Diet will approve new security legislation this September. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF, Japan’s armed services) should thus be better able to assist allied militaries (“collective self defense”), and to intervene overseas, even if Japan is not directly under attack.
The most striking aspect of these reforms is that they should even have to be enacted. Other states, regardless of their political orientation, take it for granted that their soldiers, sailors, and airmen shouldn’t wait for their country to be bombed by the enemy to start fighting.
In Japan’s case, Article 9 of the U.S.-drafted 1947 constitution renounces the right of belligerency and bans the country from having a military. However, Washington quickly decided that Japan should contribute to the defense of the Free World. Thus, it pushed Japan, against the wishes of many, including some conservatives, to establish a military in the early 1950s. To maintain the fiction that Article 9 was respected, they were called Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
Besides Article 9, pacifism retains a strong hold on numerous Japanese, and not only among leftists. Seventy years of peace thanks to the protective umbrella of the United States (and the SDF themselves) have allowed some Japanese to believe that the end of history had arrived, thus negating the requirement for national defense.
Read the full story at The Diplomat