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Younghusband
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Younghusband

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March 15th, 2005

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The slow death of Article 9

From JapanToday.com
LDP wants to clarify self-defense, SDF status in new constitution
Most members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s subcommittee for reviewing national security matters in connection with drafting a new constitution agree that Japan’s right to self-defense should be spelled out in the supreme law… . Many subcommittee members also shared the view that the war-renouncing article should be rewritten so the Self-Defense Forces would be clarified as a military force and the SDF’s central role described as international cooperation activities, they said.

This has been drawn out for such a tediously long time… War is prohibited under international law unless for reasons of self-defense. Doesn’t that make every national military a “self-defense force”? Why call raw fish “sushi”?

Japan wants to help militarily on the international scene, and due to its economic integration (ie. it’s a Core power as per Barnett) I don’t think we should fear another Taisho-style militarization of society. Yes, yes I know it isn’t the Western Core powers that fear the Japanese war machine, it is that Eastern Core power: China. But that is for another post…

Comments to this entry

Joe
March 15, 2005
3:17 pm
"International law?" Heh. Heh-heh.

Good call re: China. I'll still maintain that as long as China acts like a dick over Taiwan, Japan can act like a dick over Article 9. At this point, it's naïve to think that East Asia is going to stay stable if China takes the upper hand in power...
Adamu
March 15, 2005
6:13 pm
It's strange -- when Japan took over most of China during World War II, I doubt anyone ever imagined that one day people would think of China as the dominant power in Asia. However, now that seems all but inevitable.
Jing
March 16, 2005
1:04 am
Not so strange at all. The Danes once dominated northern Europe, as did the Swedes as well. The Netherlands once had a sprawling economic empire, but it was supplanted by England, as were Spain and Portugal. Italy was once the home of an empire that spanned from Britain to North Africa, but is now a second tier European power. The Arabs carved out an empire with religion and sword, only to be supplanted by the Turks whose empire was in turn destroyed. The Soviet Union of a mere 2 decades ago was a collosus, but now it is gone as well. China, once the most powerful empire in Asia, too was surpassed by the west in the 19th century and then by Japan in the 20th. The balance of power is constantly in flux. It is not strange at all that China would be thought of as the dominant power in Asia, unless one subscribes to a rather limited 20th century Japanese point of view. Afterall at the time, most western observers thought it a strange idea then that Japan, which was a peripheral state, would come to surpass China.