Japan Diet OKs security bills allowing greater military role

The editorial, reposted on the website of party mouthpiece People’s Daily with the headline, “Abe has planted the seeds of trouble by pushing through the security Bills”, also said Japan needs to remove USA troops now based on its soil to become a truly normal country.

Japan’s parliament voted into law on Saturday a defence policy shift that could let troops fight overseas for the first time since 1945, a milestone in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push to loosen the limits of the pacifist constitution on the military. The lower parliamentary chamber passed the legislation in July.

“Definitely, the enactment of this legislation is tantamount to a diplomatic suicide for Japanese foreign affairs and a setback to all the efforts Japan is making to bring permanent and durable peace to the region and to the world”, Matthews told Xinhua. One major goal of the legislation is to allow the military to work more closely with its most important ally, the United States.

Asia strategist Keith Henry said Mr Abe wanted Japan to play a proactive role in regional security to counter potential threats from China and North Korea.

“Japan is like the 42-year-old kid still living in the basement of the US “, Henry said. By this reason, the revised Situations in Areas Surrounding Japanese Law and new global Peace Support Law would allow the JSDF to participate in a wide range of armed conflicts around the world as a way of “providing rear-area support” to the United States or multinational forces. The measure faced substantial opposition within Japan and protestors [NPR report] gathered outside the parliament on Friday.

Hirokawa Nagatomo, a fourth-year student at Waseda University, told Yonhap that young Japanese feel the security bill is a relevant issue and scenarios in which Japan would have to go to war can not be inconsequential to young people.

Abe wants what he calls a normalisation of Japan’s military posture, which has been restricted to narrowly defined self-defence and aid missions by a pacifist constitution imposed by the USA after World War II.

For example, Japan would be able to intercept a missile flying over Japan and headed for U.S. territory.

When the Abe-led ruling bloc passed the bills through the upper house, tens of thousands of protesters rallied around the national Diet building demanding the prime minister’s resignation and the retract of the bills. “Japan is a country that can’t say no to America”, said Misaki Takashima, a 51-year-old housewife at the protest, who braved sputtering Tokyo rain to voice her opposition.

One of the bills “amends 10 existing security-related laws to lift various SDF restrictions, including Article 9’s long-standing ban on collective self-defense”, Japan Times writes.

Japanese are not anti-military anymore, in the way they were in the immediate postwar decades, but the pacifist chord remains strong almost 70 years later, as evidenced by the ruckus inside and outside parliament over the security legislation.