At the opening of the 1964 Olympic Games, a flock of white doves plumed from the stadium into the blue Tokyo skies: Symbols of a nation reborn from the ashes of war as a high-flying pacifist. Just two minutes later, a Japanese military jet screamed across the same skies.
It was a jarring moment for everyone familiar with Japan’s post-war Constitution and its war-renouncing Article 9. How exactly do you square the phrase “land, sea and air forces ... will never be maintained” with a military fly-by on a global stage?
By the time the Olympics return to Tokyo in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expects to have settled that question once and for all — even if it means putting his economic revival programme, Abenomics, on the back burner.
The time is ripe, he said last week, for the first amendment to Japan’s 70-year-old Constitution — an act of national self-determination that the country has consciously denied itself for three generations.
Should Mr Abe pull this off, the immediate practical impact may be limited. The initial change he appears to have in mind will be an additional paragraph granting constitutionality to a Japanese military that has, de facto, existed for decades. The psychological impact on Japan and its sense of nationhood, however, will be immense.
Mr Abe has clearly seen his window. The Constitution may have been drafted by Americans and promulgated while a broken Japan was under United States occupation, but it has proved resistant to various post-war waves of Japanese nationalism. Suddenly, partly because the opposition is weak, it seems vulnerable.
The document and its tenets remain cherished by many Japanese, but some polls suggest the percentage who favour change is rising steadily. Usefully for Mr Abe, the attempt to grant constitutional legitimacy to Japan’s military is divisive, but not toxic. Regional tension is running high, China’s island-building activities are formidable, and Mr Donald Trump’s erratic presidency has revived concerns over the US’ reliability as an ally.
Mr Abe has said he wants to show that the Constitution is not “immortal”; a deeper ambition may be to thrust it into the market for other, more sensitive amendments.
As his newly revealed 2020 deadline suggests, he expects the process of securing an amendment to take at least two years — a period likely to foment exceptional political complexity as the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP), its coalition partner Komeito and the opposition Democratic party battle with the electoral calculus of major change.
For now, however, two questions loom. The first is whether Mr Abe can actually pull this off. Stretched before him are a series of hurdles that has been a powerful historic deterrent to others. He must secure a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Japan’s Parliament before the proposed amendment is put to a national referendum, where he must secure a simple majority.
It is daunting, but no Japanese leader in recent decades has come close to the trinity of highly concentrated control over the LDP, abject disarray of the opposition and a single-minded sense of mission.
In Parliament, Mr Abe has, in theory, been unstoppable since Upper-House elections last July. The LDP has a two-thirds majority in the Lower House, and, when combined with smaller parties and independents who support constitutional reform, has a supermajority in the Upper House too. The referendum creates more extensive uncertainty, but early polling has been positive.
The second question is whether the Prime Minister’s date with constitutional destiny will suck energy away from the many unfinished reforms of Abenomics.
Other programmes, such as “womenomics” and corporate governance reform, are partially in place, but need the permanent throb of prime ministerial involvement to keep old bad habits from creeping back. Others, such as pushing for wage increases and greater levels of individual stock investment, have largely failed.
If Mr Abe’s distraction from this side of things becomes too obvious, financial markets and the Japanese public could finally decide that Abenomics is a busted flush. The public irritation may not be trivial, and irritation augurs badly when you have a referendum to win. Similarly with investors.
Since Mr Abe came to power in December 2012, the Nikkei 225 stock average has risen about 95 per cent. That rise was amplified by the Bank of Japan’s easing programmes, but fundamentally reflected the enthusiasm with which foreign investors fell for the narrative of a strong leader pushing for overdue change. They can fall very quickly out of love too.
For the past four years, it seemed fair to assume that Mr Abe’s desired legacy was an economy transformed and a public returned to optimism after almost three decades of post-bubble blues.
As of last week, it seems his greater wish may be to attend the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony in 2020 satisfied that any military jets in the sky are also in the Constitution. FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leo Lewis is Tokyo correspondent for the Financial Times