Along with Party Line

The House of Representatives passed eleven bills for enhanced national security along with party line on Thursday. The hall showed unusual view, in which only supporters of the bills participated in the voting and the opponents protested against the unilateral procedure with empty seats. Democracy makes a decision with support of numerical majority. However, the leading parties with great majority in the House only represented public minority. If this were a democracy, most Japanese are disappointed with it.

Before voting, parties had the last debate for the bills. Jun Matsumoto, representing the Liberal Democratic, insisted on that the discussion had thoroughly been done, saying “We spent the longest time for the bill among the bills related to security policy.” Despite no substantial conclusion over constitutionality of the bills, LDP focused on how much the time being spent, making no sense. Kiyohiko Toyama affiliated with Komeito stressed that there would be no change in Japan’s pacifist strategy with new legislation without any persuasive logic.

The opposite parties cast fundamental questions to Shinzo Abe administration. Democratic leader, Katsuya Okada, explicitly demanded withdrawal of the bills. “The biggest problem is exercising collective self-defense right, even though it is limited. New three principles for exercising collective self-defense right contradict constitutionalism and definition of “existence crisis situation,” in which Japan would be able to exercise the right, is too unclear,” told Okada. The leader of Japan Communist Party named the legislation “war exercising bills” and dismissed every reason Abe raised for supporting the bills as made by despotism.

Innovation Party, which had been playing the game as the joker, finally joined the coalition of the opposite parties, after its alternative bills were mercilessly killed by LDP. “Three principles are so vague that the government will be unleashed to use its force with arbitral decision. It is natural that the constitutional scholars warned its unconstitutionality. We never allow any kind of collective self-defense aiming to defend other country,” told the president, Yorihisa Matsuno.

After the debate, members of those opposite three parties walked out from the hall. Without participants from the opposite, leading parties passed the bills without casting ballots, only expressing their approval with standing from their seats. Abe’s handling of democracy, in which majority can do anything it wants, is losing its credibility, along with the decline of supporting rate for him.