再軍備する日本 Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power
The Japanese government insisted on interpreting Japan’s new constitution to allow for self-defense. Even as the document was being drafted in 1946, Japanese leaders sought to temper General MacArthur’s zeal for pacifying their nation.8 The Committee to Consider the Problem of the Constitution, tasked with working with the occupation authorities on the draft, sought to tone down MacArthur’s language. Once the draft of the new constitution went to the Japanese House of Representatives, the chair of its Committee on the Bill for Revising the Imperial Constitution, Ashida Hitoshi, reportedly tweaked it even further to open the way to allowing Japan to acquire military force for self-defense. The final version of Article Nine, Japan’s renunciation of war, reads as follows:
“
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
