Not Settling Dispute over Article 9

Against insistent ambition of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Liberal Democratic Party abandoned concluding the draft of constitutional amendment before the end of this year. LDP Headquarters for Promotion of Constitutional Amendment released on Wednesday its talking points of their discussion, which raised two opinions on changing Article 9 of Constitution of Japan. But the party still hopes to take initiative for the amendment in the Diet next year.

In May, Abe proposed adding a provision in the Constitution for endorsing the status of Self-defense Force. LDP included Abe’s proposal in their campaign promise in the election of House of Representatives this fall. But Section 2 of Article 9 renounces “force” as a measure of settling international dispute, making contradiction with existence of Self-defense “Force.” There is a consistent argument in LDP that Section 2 has to be removed, if SDF will be written in the Constitution.

The headquarters wrapped up its discussion keeping two options for Article 9: one was to add SDF with Section 1 and 2 unchanged and another was to clearly describe the purpose and characteristic of SDF with removal of Section 2. Abe’s argument of maintaining Section 1 and 2 enjoys broad support in the party, because it can supposedly achieve approvals from other parties, especially LDP’s coalition partner Komeito.

In the discussion of the headquarters, some lawmakers close to Abe argued that maintenance of existing sections should be a realistic approach to pass the Diet and national referendum. But a political rival of Abe, former Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishiba, opposed that argument. “If you say that Article 9 has to be changed, with reasoning of drastic change of security situation, leaving substantially unchanged provision will not be logically consistent,” said Ishiba. This is a collision between amendment in anyway and meaningful amendment.

The headquarters also kept two options for creating emergency clause. One was to add exceptional case for extending the term of lawmakers or postponing election in emergency like a great earthquake. Another was notorious opinion of concentrating power to the government and restriction of human rights, which would remind the people of dictatorship of Nazis.

They proposed adding to Article 47 a description of distributing at lease one seat to each electoral district based on prefectural border in House of Councillors. Although it was to guarantee local prefectures keeping their representatives, there is no argument to guarantee parity in the number of seats between male and female lawmakers to represent more woman voices. LDP also maintained unnecessary argument for guaranteeing education for free, which would not require constitutional amendment.