Peace and regional security in the Asia-Pacific: a Japanese proposal

Abstract

The security implications of the end of the Cold War took longer to be appreciated in East Asia than in Europe, but by the mid-1990s loomed large. The two distinctively Japanese dimensions to the debate are the future of the US-Japan Security Treaty (whose abrogation was urged by prominent American voices in the pages of Foreign Affairs in 1995), and the closely-related questions of Japan's own military posture, including its future contribution to the United Nations (on which it aspired to a permanent Security Council seat). The debate on revision of the constitution of 1946 entered a new phase as a result of the changed international circumstances of the 1990s. Whereas in the established Cold War debate on constitutional revision, 'conservatives' favoured a more central role to the emperor and overt state possession of military forces, and the Socialist and Communist parties clung to a strict 'defend the constitution' line (often interpreted to mean unarmed neutrality), after 1990 attention focused on the need for Japan to maximise its contribution to the construction of a New World Order, and on whether the existing constitutional arrangements were appropriate or needed revision to that end. Rethinking on both 'conservative' and 'socialist' sides was profound and for the first time a narrow majority in public opinion surveys came to favour revision. The document which follows was written by a group of prominent Japanese scholars of law, history and politics, who attempt to recast the traditional 'constitutional defence' position in such a way as to develop a positive, while distinctively 'pacifist' vision for Japan. Their formula calls for Japan to adopt a 'Basic Peace Law' to complement the constitution, and to play a greatly expanded international role, involving a gradual renegotiation of the US-Japan Security Treaty. It was published in 1993 and 1994 in the monthly journal Sekai, published by the Iwanami publishing group, and is here presented in English translation for the first time.