and provide logistical support to South Korea if Pyongyang invaded, but could not deploy Japanese troops to Korea. The BBC notes, for example, that Japan could now shoot down a North Korean missile fired at the U.S. and other allies if those allies were attacked, although there would still be limits on the scope and scale of Japanese assistance. Japanese forces will now be able to assist the U.S. Instead, it reinterprets it to allow for “collective self-defense.” That would require a constitutional amendment and two-thirds support in both houses of the Diet, which Abe and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lack. The bill passed on Friday does not change Article 9’s language. occupation of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s fall, to considerable controversy.) JSDF forces participate in UN peacekeeping operations and humanitarian missions, but avoided UN-authorized combat missions in Korea or during the Gulf War. The second clause pledges that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained” by Japan, and that “the right of belligerency will not be recognized.” As the name of Japan’s military suggests, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces exist only to protect the Japanese homeland. Article 11 of the Italian Constitution declares that Italy “rejects war as an instrument of aggression.” Article 26 of Germany’s Basic Law forbids “activities tending and undertaken with the intent to disturb peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for aggressive war.”īut Article 9 goes even further. This constitutional language is common among the former Axis powers. occupation in 1947, declares that the Japanese people “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” Article 9 of the post-war constitution, drafted under U.S. The policy is rooted in the horrors of the Pacific War and Japan’s wartime trauma, including the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pacifism formed the nucleus of Japan’s foreign policy in the post-war era. It passed Friday after three days of raucous debate in the House of Councillors, the upper house of the Japanese parliament, marking a historic shift in the nation’s approach to international affairs. On Thursday, legislators brawled when opposition politicians tried to physically block a vote on the legislation. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent considerable effort to push a bill reinterpreting Article 9 of the country’s constitution through the Diet, Japan’s legislature. Seven decades after its surrender ended World War II, Japan took its most significant step away from the pacifist foreign policy that shaped 70 years of its post-war history.
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