Abe is clearly on a mission to amend Japan’s constitution, despite pledges to put the economy first

Kevin Rafferty says with polls showing most Japanese are against constitutional reform, the prime minister should think twice before messing with popular fears

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Tomomi Inada, the newly appointed defence minister of Japan, speaks at a news conference at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's official residence in Tokyo. Photo: Reuters

Published: 2:47pm, 8 Aug 2016Updated: 5:31pm, 8 Aug 2016

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s appointment of the strongly nationalist Tomomi Inada to the key and sensitive post of defence minister can hardly be reassuring either to Japan’s neighbours or to the majority of Japanese who don’t want to change the country’s long-revered constitution. A small test will be whether Inada visits the Yasukuni Shrine in the next week to honour the country’s war dead, as has been her wont.

But her appointment and political gossip that she is being lined up to succeed Abe when his term expires in 2018 – unless he changes the rules to be able to continue in office – suggest Abe and friends are hell-bent on amending the constitution, in their eyes a humiliating imposition by the victorious US forces.

Tomomi Inada reviews an honour guard during a welcoming ceremony in Tokyo after being named defence minister. Photo: AFP

Initially, Abe heralded his triumph in last month’s elections for half of the upper house of parliament as a victory for his “Abenomics” economic policies, specifically asserting that the poll was not about the constitution. Before the election, Masahiko Komura, vice-president of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, had declared on TV there was “zero possibility” that Abe would revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution, even if he won a two-thirds majority.

Abe reshuffles Cabinet, picks controversial hawkish Inada as defence minister

The LDP fell just short of such a majority in the upper house, but can comfortably count on allies to achieve that. Immediately after the results came in, Abe declared: “The nation has given me a powerful mandate to further accelerate Abenomics.”

But he changed his tune the next day, claiming it was his “duty” as LDP leader to revise the constitution. “We have always set a goal of revising the constitution,” he said. “That is my duty.”

Despite earlier asserting that the economy and “Abenomics” were his priority, Shinzo Abe has said it is his “duty” to revise Japan’s constitution, which the LDP sees as a humiliation imposed by the victorious US forces. Photo: Bloomberg

Winning big with a relatively low 54 per cent turnout on an economic platform does not give Abe a mandate for constitutional change. Anyway, all opinion polls show that most Japanese are against it. A recent poll by public broadcaster NHK showed that only 26 per cent agree with constitutional reform, and only 11 per cent believe that it is a priority.

Equally important, Abe ’s constitutional vision is impaired. Inspired by his grandfather, wartime minister and post-war prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, Abe wants to make Japan “normal” again; but that normality is the normal of the imperial 1930s. No wonder that Japan’s neighbours, including South Korea and China, are sounding alarm bells.