Offensive Self-Defense
Last Thursday, Japan’s House of Representatives passed a new security bill that would allow its defense forces to fight overseas in the name of collective self-defense. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the principal proponent of this bill, supporting it despite plummeting approval ratings and a population rapidly torn asunder by a rare cultural display of outrage and civil instability. For the past 70 years, Japan has renounced war and maintained a pacifist stance. Now, critics warn that the new bill threatens to set the nation on a warpath, a nation that has, until recently, officially assumed a diplomatic stance equivalent to that of woodland elves in a Tolkien novel.
The Japanese people seem to have two fundamental issues with the bill in question. First, it brings to light a seemingly semantic but critical issue in Japan’s postwar constitution. Article Nine includes a clause that limits military force to a severe minimum. The country is instead to seek international peace and order without belligerent leverage. As is the problem with most legal documents, the devil is in the details, and Article Nine remains receptive to further interpretation. In this case, it is how to constitutionally satisfy the need for some kind of national defense.
Historically, Japan remains the only nation to have thrashed Russia in an industrial-era conflict. In the years after the Russo-Japanese war, the increasingly imperialistic nation ravished the Chinese mainland and the Malay Peninsula. In effect, it carved out a latitudinal Pacific empire before finally caving in to Oppenheimer and the atom. During this bloodlust, the world witnessed atrocities that today remain a testament to the human aptitude for cruelty and evil. The philosophy of Imperial Japanese high-command harkened to Julius Caesar’s brutal maxim, “War gives the right of the conquerors to impose any conditions they please upon the vanquished.”
The people of Japan would do well to remember what perils face a country that has truly fallen to its knees. “Armed conflict” is a euphemistic phrase; the essence of war is still savagery, controlled or not. It is precisely for this reason that a nation must maintain a modicum of arms, lest its populace be vulnerable to utter butchery by another.
With this prologue, we can begin to understand the debate incurred by the constitution, as well as new security bills trying to reinterpret it. How should Japan maintain a much-needed minimum level of self-defense? Should it take an entirely insular approach, a precedent set by the Swiss? Or should it, as it has done in the past, relegate the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) to a logistical role, while the U.S. casts a shield from its various military bases? Abe, and constituents of the new bill, argue a third possibility: Japan should assert dominion over its territory by proactively contributing to an Asian umbrella. Essentially, the country would become a working member of a conglomerate, helping to assert stability under the name of Pax Americana. Politicians have coined this mechanism “collective self-defense.”
Abe’s bill permits Japanese forces to fight overseas if such a conflict is deemed necessary to preserve the safety of the country. Undoubtedly, the legislation is also designed with the aim of containing China. This is an understandable rationale. China, with its population of 1.3 billion, military of more than 2 million active personnel and economy that will likely soon surpass the U.S.’s, is already a regional hegemon in Asia. It is logical to offset this unipolarity with a union of smaller countries, notably Japan, South Korea, India and the Philippines. Fate, as usual, has taken an ironic course. Japan finds itself standing up to its former conquest and must cooperate with other victims of its imperialistic past to do so.
The controversial bill treads a fine line between self-defense and self-interest. Critics claim that only a direct attack against the Japanese homeland can be considered justification for military intervention. To them, it is unethical that Japan should ever maintain a casus belli itself, regardless of militarization by neighboring countries. Proponents have retorted in a rather Clausewitzian way, arguing that armed force is a diplomatic instrument like any other and that the new bill would promote peace by acting as a deterrent against aggression aimed at Japan.
All in all, the debate over acceptable military force is far from over. Young and old, citizen and politician, radical and moderate, have been divided by this matter, which has uprooted a longstanding cultural ethos of peace and tranquility. And the question remains: how did the security bill make it this far? With 54 percent of the country in open opposition to the bill and 70 percent maintaining that it need not be enacted, does it not seem authoritarian, even fascistic, of Shinzo Abe to steer this bill through the Diet? It is this seeming affront to democracy that is the secondary source of my countrymen’s anger and dismay toward the proposed legislation.
The rather unexceptional truth is that the recent security reforms have not been passed through legislature at the behest of dictatorial powers. Instead, these movements are the products of shrewd politics on Abe’s part. To appreciate this achievement requires a cursory understanding of Japan’s system of state.
The Japanese government is modeled after the Westminster parliamentary style. It follows a bicameral structure, comprising a dominant House of Representatives, the equivalent of a House of Commons, and a much smaller House of Councilors, or the Upper House.
Constitutional amendments can only be made after both legislative branches, as well as the public via a referendum, have approved them. Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party are very aware of the fact that any outright constitutional changes to Article Nine would fall short after being mocked and rebuffed by an incredibly pacifistic populace.
Proponents of the new security measures have implemented an ingenious solution. Instead of an amendment, they have framed the inner working of the bills as a reinterpretation of the current clause in Article Nine. Whether the new readings are controversial or not, they do not count as direct constitutional changes. Hence, such bills require only the approval of the Upper and Lower Houses and are capable of entirely avoiding a public hand on the matter. It is quite convenient, of course, that the LDP, as the dominant party in the Diet, holds enough sway in both legislative branches to satisfy the two-thirds majority required in each House to approve them.
This is certainly a back-door approach, with the end goal of constructing a skeleton of a constitutional amendment, so that the public may be gradually accustomed and receptive to a total revision. Many scholars and lawyers have called the “reinterpretations” unconstitutional to the highest degree.
The fact remains, 70 years after World War II, the nation of Japan stands at a crossroads. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear that all nations must be capable of warfare. It is not as obvious, however, how a country should approach the need for military capacity. At some point, Japan must resolve its constitutional confusions and select a course, whether it be collective self-defense or strict self-restraint. To further add to the dilemma, all of this is at odds with a general populace that overwhelmingly is in support of pacifism in its purest sense, of defending only when attacked. Safety may be more important than democracy in the short run. Certainly, it is the pressing issue. But what use is there in preserving a country rotten in its liberty, the result of political precedents that sidelined the common people in favor of a select few? ♥