By Purnaka L. de Silva

Japan’s acquisition of a parliamentary supermajority under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s landslide election victory marks a qualitative shift in the country’s political trajectory with significant implications for regional security, historical reconciliation, and the post-1945 pacifist international legal order.

Takaichi is a hardline nationalist conservative politician with ideological proximity to ultra-nationalist and revisionist currents. As such, she (a) denies Imperial Japan’s wartime military aggression and atrocities during World War II, (b) denies that coercion was used against “comfort women” (sexual slaves for Japanese troops), and (c) criticizes past apologies for war crimes, such as the Kono and Murayama statements.

In 2011, Takaichi was photographed with Kazunari Yamada, the head of a fringe group referred to as the “Japan Nazi Party.” Most visibly, her long-standing association with the influential ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalist 70,000-member Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) lobbying organization and the right-wing Japan Innovation Party (Ishin no Kai) is deeply troubling.

With their support, Takaichi will take the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP or Jimintō), the major conservative and nationalist political party in Japan, founded in 1955, further to the extreme right. She will use her parliamentary supermajority to increase military spending and officially recognize Japan’s armed forces by revising Article 9 of The Constitution of Japan – which is the “peace clause” – enacted in 1947 that formally renounces war as a sovereign right, prohibits the threat or use of force to settle international disputes, and forbids the maintenance of land, sea, or air forces.

All this, combined with Takaichi’s hawkish positioning on China, and repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Convicted Class A war criminals—raises concerns among neighboring states—including China, South Korea (ROK), North Korea (DPRK) and Russia, and the wider international community.

While Japan remains institutionally constrained by democratic checks, alliance structures, and economic interdependence, a supermajority reduces veto points and accelerates policy implementation. The central risk is not an immediate reversion to pre-1945 militarism, but a steady normalization of coercive power projection, historical revisionism, and ideological reframing of national identity and the possible resurrection of Bushidō into a tool for Japanese ultra-nationalism and military expansionism that could destabilize Northeast Asia, weaken confidence-building mechanisms, and erode the normative foundations of Japan’s........

© Eurasia Review