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Japan moves toward revising Constitution with enactment of referendum bill
Monday, May 14, 2007 at 15:14 EDT
TOKYO — Legislation to set referendum procedures for constitutional amendment was enacted during a House of Councillors plenary session Monday, the first such law since Japan's pacifist Constitution went into force 60 years ago.
The new law will go into force in three years and reflects Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's determination to revise the Constitution in a step to depart from what Abe calls Japan's "postwar regime."
The Constitution states that any amendment is to be initiated by the Diet through a concurring vote of two-thirds in both houses and then be presented to the people for endorsement by a majority vote in a referendum.
No legislation had been established that sets rules for such a referendum. Under the new law, Japanese citizens aged 18 or older are eligible to vote in a constitutional referendum, against the current minimum eligible age of 20 for voting in an election.
The full upper house is expected to pass the legislation on Monday. The lower house approved the bill last month.
Abe, an outspoken conservative and the first premier born after World War II, has set rewriting the constitution as a top goal.
"We live in an era in which we must debate drafting a new constitution amid calls for Japan to play a larger role in the international community," Abe told a special upper house committee on the Constitution on Friday.
Even though a referendum cannot take place before 2010, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party says drafting an outline of a prospective re-writing is possible before that date.
Opinion polls have shown that the Japanese public support the general idea of constitutional amendment.
However, a majority of the public still support Article Nine, under which Japan renounces the right to use or even threaten to use force as a means of settling international disputes.
Liberals argue that amending the clause would take Japan a step closer to engaging in armed conflicts.
But Japan already has one of the world's best-funded armed forces, skirting the constitution by calling its troops the Self-Defense Forces.
Abe has said he wants to recognize the troops as a full-fledged military and let them play a more active role in international operations, particularly humanitarian missions.
During the election campaign, Abe will tout the LDP's draft of a new Constitution, which features removing the second clause of the war-renouncing Article 9 to allow Japan to officially possess military forces for self-defense. The present clause stipulates that Japan will never maintain land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential.
http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/406640
