We can hardly have expected Japan’s post-WWII peacenik attitude to long survive the resurgence of Chinese military power. The question is whether grass eater culture and demographic decline could potentially compete with the bushido tradition and the fear of an expansionary China. From Zerohedge:
Reuters reports: The draft [of the revised Constitution] deletes a guarantee of basic human rights and prescribes duties, such as submission to an undefined “public interest and public order.” The military would be empowered to maintain that “public order.”
This article will blow your mind. Some key excerpts:
Shinzo Abe makes no secret of wanting to revise Japan’s constitution, which was drafted by the United States after World War Two, to formalize the country’s right to have a military – but critics say his plans go deeper and could return Japan to its socially conservative, authoritarian past. Abe, 58, returned to office in December for a second term as prime minister and is enjoying sky-high support on the back of his “Abenomics” recipe for reviving the economy through hyper-easy monetary policy, big spending and structural reform.
However, sweeping changes proposed by Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in a draft constitution would strike at the heart of the charter with an assault on basic civil rights that could muzzle the media, undermine gender equality and generally open the door to an authoritarian state, activists and scholars say.
The Japanese are distrustful of military authoritarianism, given what happened in the first half of the 20th century, but they are even more distrustful of China. If they are faced with a choice between the two, they will choose authoritarianism every single time. And if the LDP is openly attacking civil rights and muzzling the media, you can be certain there will soon be some sort of birthrate-boosting program in the works.