Japan rejects militarism in the streets

Recent polls indicate that more than 80 percent of the Japanese public condemns the US and Israeli attack on Iran, and the prime minister's own popularity appears to be in drastic decline.

“Ame ni mo makezu, be not defeated by the rain,” wrote the Japanese author and agronomist Kenji Miyazawa in 1931, in a posthumously published poem that later became one of his most famous. It is a hymn to compassion as well as resilience, and the rallying call for an attitude that refuses to bow to external forces.

The many thousands of demonstrators who gathered in more than 30 cities across Japan on Wednesday evening certainly did not surrender to the rain that blanketed nearly the entire archipelago. They came out to protest against the war in Iran, the foreign policies of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her government's push to revise Article 9 of the Constitution. This article, it is worth recalling, has since 1947 prohibited Japan from using war to resolve international disputes; it effectively forbids the country from maintaining a traditional military, allowing only self-defense forces.

Organized by citizen groups, committees and several NGOs, Wednesday's demonstrations are in continuity with protests that have been ongoing in various forms for more than a decade, ever since the Committee for Action to Stop the War and Protect Article 9 began gathering on the 19th of every month in front of the National Diet Building.

In recent months, however, the protests have grown increasingly vocal, even in a country reluctant to hold massive street marches, at least since the end of the highly politicized 1960s and 1970s. The only exception was perhaps the massive wave of protests that erupted in 2015 and 2016 led by SEALDs, a student activist group that........

© Il Manifesto Global