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.

That was 1990. The conversation has barely moved.

The problem is not that Japan lacks courage or strategic sense. It is that a significant strand of Japanese politics and journalism cannot discuss security without reflexively invoking the imagery of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and Japan’s brutal imperial past. Any serious defense debate becomes, by rhetorical sleight of hand, a warning of imperial revival. The result is not vigilance but a kind of intellectual paralysis dressed up as moral seriousness.

A new generation of voters is beginning to call this out. Sometimes described as the sengo no shuen (end........

© The Japan Times