Even before the votes are cast in Japan's election on Sunday, one thing is clear: the pacifism that has defined the security debate since the nation's defeat in World War Two is fading.
Nearly six decades after Japan renounced the right to ever go to war again, a growing number of politicians from both the dominant ruling and opposition parties think it's time to shed the constraints of the US-drafted pacifist constitution.
More startling in the only nation ever to suffer nuclear attacks, cabinet ministers who once feared for their jobs if they broke the nuclear taboo now say with impunity that there may come a time when Japan should consider having its own nuclear arms rather than relying solely on an alliance with the US.
That both trends have emerged clearly even as an election looms speaks volumes about the changing mindset of many Japanese voters, whose sense of geopolitical insecurity has deepened as Japan's economic clout has waned over the past decade.
Worries about North Korea's nuclear arms program and the spectre of China, whose military is growing along with its economic might, are pushing Japan to rethink its past pacifism.
"Japan had felt exempt from the basic insecurity prevailing throughout the world, but now it has become a `normal country,'" said Takashi Inoguchi, a University of Tokyo professor.
Calls from inside the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in power with barely a break since it was founded in 1955, to revise the constitution's war-renouncing Article Nine and legitimize the existence of Japan's huge military, are not new.
But for decades that stance was staunchly opposed by the rival Socialists, locked in an ideological battle with the LDP under what came to be called the "1955 system."
A band of LDP pacifists, many of whom remembered the horrors of World War Two, shared the Socialist commitment to guarding the constitution's pacifist pledge renouncing war and the right to maintain a military.
Death knell of the doves?
Now, however, the LDP's most outspoken pacifist, wily party veteran Hiromu Nonaka, is retiring; the Socialists are a fading force and their successor as Japan's biggest opposition party, the Democrats, are pondering the need to alter the constitution.
The LDP-led ruling coalition is expected to win a majority in Sunday's election, while the Democrats are also likely to boost their presence in parliament's powerful 480-seat lower house.
The shrinking Socialists could see their seats halved from the 18 they held in the last lower house and the equally pacifist Communists, who had 20, are also unlikely to fare well.
"It's not so much a shift to the right as a drift to the right," said Gerald Curtis, a professor of Japanese politics at New York's Columbia University. "There's no ballast on the left."
Popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has made clear since taking office in 2001 that he favors revising Article Nine, and the LDP's campaign platform now calls for the party to draft a bill to revise the constitution by its 50th anniversary in 2005.
In a major shift, the Democratic Party -- whose campaign manifesto pledges to "Build a Strong Japan" -- urges debate of the long-taboo topic.
"The `1995 system,' with its ideological split between the LDP and the Socialists, is completely finished," said Junko Hirose, a senior researcher at the National Diet Library.
LDP-led governments have already stretched the constitutional limits on the military, most recently by enacting in July a law enabling the dispatch of non-combat troops to help rebuild Iraq.
Nuclear allergy
The Democratic Party opposes troop deployment in Iraq, as do many Japanese voters. But Hirose and others suggest that the electorate's antipathy stems less from pacifist convictions than a feeling that Japan's national interests would not be served.
"I've never thought the Japanese as a whole were pacifists in the Western sense, that is, philosophically pacifists who would refuse to take up arms no matter what," Samuel Shepherd, an expert on Japan's education system, said recently.
"The so-called pacifism here is of a different kind, because of the great horror of the war. But times change and you are getting a new generation which has never participated in war."
That said, public opinion towards revising Article Nine probably still lags the shift in sentiment among lawmakers, while the allergy to nuclear weapons seems to run even deeper.
Constitutional revisions must be approved by two-thirds of the lawmakers in both chambers of parliament and by a majority of voters in a referendum.
"I think we should revise Article Nine, but parties should listen to people's views before just including that in their platforms," said Akira Satomi, 32, a printing company salesman.
"Nuclear weapons are a different matter," he added. "There shouldn't be a taboo on debate, but I'm against having them."
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