Repeating Article 9 like a mantra isn’t a foreign policy
When every security debate ends in 1945, with Article 9 of the Constitution, Japan loses sight of the world it actually lives in.This is not a principled commitment to pacifism or a conscious choice to forswear war. It reflects a failure of political imagination — and of communication — to build public literacy about the serious security challenges Japan faces eight decades since World War II and to articulate a realistic approach to protecting its national interests.I was a 17-year-old Japanese exchange student in Virginia Beach, Virginia, when the First Gulf War broke out. CNN played on the cafeteria television at lunch, and one afternoon a classmate turned to me — not with anger, but with the quiet disappointment of someone who had expected more from a friend. “Americans are dying out there,” she said, “and Japan just writes a check.” I had no answer. What unsettled me, returning home, was that my country did not seem to have an answer either. Not a real one. Just Article 9, repeated like a mantra long after it had ceased to be examined.
