vague-humanoid:

wearejapanese:

The way Shinzō Abe sees it, Japan has learned all the lessons of war. “Now is the time to make a start on carving out a new era beyond the ‘postwar’ era,” the prime minister said in January in his first policy speech before the Diet. “[We will] take on the challenge of building up our nation anew.” As Japan celebrates the seventieth anniversary of the country’s postwar constitution, part of that “new nation-building” means rescripting it; the first order of business is shedding a shameful past.

Since taking office for the second time in 2012, Abe has spearheaded a campaign to revise Japan’s constitution, which has long kept the country from having a full-fledged military. In July’s upper house election, Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) secured the parliamentary supermajority needed to pave the way for a national referendum to amend Article 9, the constitution’s “peace clause.”

Abe, who could become Japan’s longest-running prime minister since World War II, has unleashed a slew of security bills to undermine the constitution and its supporters, while ramping up his call for constitutional reform to allow for offensive military capabilities — most recently, after North Korea launchedfour ballistic missiles toward Japan, a move seen as a retaliation against joint US–South Korean military exercises in the region.

During his visit to Seoul in March, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson rebuffed China’s call for the US to negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear program, announcing the end of “strategic patience” and a possible “pre-emptive action” against the regime. As tensions escalate between the US and North Korea, as well as with China over islands in the South China Sea — which, according to White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, will “no doubt” be the battleground for America’s next war — reviving Japan’s military has become part of the US’s broader effort to strengthen its foothold in the Asia-Pacific region.

The US’s support for Japan remilitarization — longstanding, and reaffirmedby the Trump administration — has emboldened Abe’s militarism. Last December, his administration approved a record defense budget of $42.5 billion, the fifth consecutive increase during his term. The antiwar demonstrations that saw tens of thousands of people gather in front of the parliament have now largely subsided. And this February, the Abe administration moved to draft its first set of constitutional amendments.

But revising Article 9 is only part of Abe’s grand vision.

The campaign for constitutional reform is a far-right movement decades in the making. Fueled by a nostalgia for military glory, ultra-nationalists have long sought to restore not only Japan’s armed forces, but its “beautiful traditional national character” — everything that the pacifist constitution is not. Drafted under US occupation, the document symbolizes the decline of Japan’s colonial rule and its defeat in the war, a chapter in history the far right desperately wants to expunge.

And Abe does as well. His “new nation” entails silencing witnesses of Japanese war atrocities to lay the groundwork for empire.

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@ayellowbirds this is that rightward swing I was talking about.