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Change Your Life! |
Sixty percent of Japanese favor revising constitution |
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April 16, 2000
TOKYO, APR 15 (AP) - A record 60 percent of Japanese support the long-taboo idea of revising the nation's U.S.-written constitution, according to a newspaper poll released Saturday.
The daily Yomiuri's survey of 1,935 citizens nationwide broke the record of 53 percent set last year.
For the first time since the annual survey began in 1981, more than half of the respondents from each of six age groups - 20s to 70s - favored revising the 1947 document written by the U.S. occupation force after World War II.
Twenty-seven percent of those surveyed opposed revising the constitution, the first time that figure has fallen below 30 percent. The newspaper conducted the poll on March 18 and 19. It did not give a margin of error.
In February, lawmakers began discussing whether to rewrite the constitution after years of public debate focusing on the so-called "peace clause" - Article 9 - which declares that Japan will never maintain "land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential."
Its military is known as the Self-Defense Force. Until recently, even questioning the need for that clause was attacked as a dangerous revival of the Japanese militarism of the early part of the 20th century, aggression which ended with America's nuclear bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the humiliation of defeat to the Western allies.
And talk of change still rankles with Asian countries invaded and colonized by Japan.
But with Japan's expansionist past an increasingly remote memory, many are calling for changes that would allow Japan to take over greater responsibility for its own defense from the United States, and play a more active role internationally |