I'm surprised that after 75 years Japan still operates under a constitution drafted by American lawyers and generals .
Has there ever been a call to create a constitution by japan lawmakers? I assume there are nationalist groups in every country but don't really see this as something that's been brought up or has been a source of contention.
I know very little of Japan prior to 1930s and was curious if people actually like their constitution…I came here after trying to figure out if Japans military is legal etc.
by pilfro
13 comments
Replacing it just because someone you didn’t like wrote it doesn’t make much sense. Surely the content of a constitution matters, not the author?
They like what’s in it. So they keep it.
What other law are you implying to replace it
There have been a bunch of attempts to change parts of the constitution
My understanding is that politicians have been trying to change it for years but find it hard to do, and some of it just isn’t followed. It really isn’t worshipped like it is in other countries probably because it was born the way it was.
doesnt matter even if the constitution is changed, their policies will still align with what US wants, almost everyone who follows politics knows this. Eventually there will be separation when the power reset will happen. Most of the japanese dont really care actually they just wanna live and they look up to US. I am not saying its a bad thing but sometimes it feels like their opinion wont change even if the US throws bricks at them.
The LDP proposed a new constitution back at the start of Abe’s second time as PM. The preamble of the proposed constitution began with the statement that it was the duty of all Japanese citizens to obey the government.
Edit: It’s hard to figure why my comment is getting downvoted.
Isn’t the constitution basically a modified version of the Meiji constitution, with Imperial powers removed and restrictions on military?
I don’t believe MacArthur and the authors came up with something new else you’d expect it to look a lot more like the American constitution.
The thing about constitutions is that by specifying how power is achieved, they give legitimacy to power. The LDP party has been in power almost without break ever since that constitution has been in place. They range from just right of the center (solid left by some USA standards) to far, far, right (solid right by USA standards) and most Japanese nationalists are in their party, if not for ideological reasons than because building networks within the LDP is the best way to get power. Many of the nationalists who aren’t in the LDP are either too extreme for the LDP and thus unlikely to get anywhere, or just plain not interested in political power so much as using elections to get attention from voters that they could parlay into another project.
Ditching the current constitution would require getting everyone to agree on a new one, which might mean the LDP losing power afterwards. No sensible LDP official is going to gamble the strong risk of entirely losing power on the slight chance of getting just a teeny bit more.
But nationalists do sometimes make plays to amend things they don’t like about the constitution. Shinzo Abe famously tried to amend the pacifism requirement of the Japanese constitution. I remember the night of the vote, people were laying down on the streets to block traffic and prevent a quorum to hold the vote. He gave up after that.
Amending other aspects of the constitution are possible, but why would any free nation in the 21st century reject say, the right to free speech, just because a foreigner wrote the clause rather than a citizen?
Japan’s military is legal? What do you mean by that?
There’s really no reason to. There are no clauses that affect the day to day freedom of an average Japanese person and most believe that Japan’s abandonment of war is what’s keeping the country out of violent conflicts. Basically any move on the government’s end to amend the actual constitution would be political forfeit because it’s like the biggest case of “If ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
What the government has tried to do in the past is to reinterpret the words of the constitution so that it allows some degree of freedom. For example from a military perspective first-strike capabilities can be interpreted as a method of defense. Same-sex marriage advocates have argued that the term “marriage between both sexes” in the constitution does not mean “one of each sex”
People aren’t too conscious about the part where a bunch of young American staffers wrote the thing. It’s a bit like Ramen where people ultimately know it comes from Chinese immigrants, but they will usually ignore that and get all proud about it as a Japanese thing. There is a lot of that sort of “collective ignoring” that happens in Japan
The story that the Japan Constitution was created by the U.S. military is propaganda used by the [Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Kaigi) and the far right. Most of the Japanese people do not want to change the Japan Constitution.
They want to strengthen the military and arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and the Japan Constitution stands in the way of that. The Nippon Kaigi is a far-right think tank, like the Heritage Foundation to Donald Trump.
One thing you should know: Japan makes a LOT of money from the USA by gaslighting us into thinking we are keeping them afloat when in reality they are using us. Lol