창작과 비평

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Professor Emerita, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

On 8 February 2026, Japan’s ruling coalition of led by Liberal Democratic Party politician Takaichi Sanae scored a landslide victory in the country’s lower house elections, securing more than two-thirds of the house’s seats. Media around the world proclaimed this as a major political landmark. Takaichi is Japan’s first female Prime Minister, and the election win places her government in a position to carry out sweeping political changes, including revising Japan’s postwar constitution for the first time since its introduction in 1947. An article in The Economist magazine proclaimed Takaichi ‘the most powerful woman in the world’.

Closer examination of events, though, reveals a long backstory behind this electoral win, and suggests that Takaichi’s power may be much more constrained than it appears. Ever since the postwar allied occupation of Japan (1945-1952), conservative forces have been seeking to change the ‘peace constitution’ introduced during the occupation period, and to rehabilitate the memory of Japan’s colonial empire and wartime expansionism. In the early days, the leading figure in the movement was Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leader Kishi Nobusuke, who held the position of Prime Minister from 1957-1960. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, Japanese success as an economic and technological powerhouse shifted the core focus of political debate away from these revanchist dreams, but they never disappeared, and – as the Japanese economy languished in the 1990s and early twenty-first century – they were energetically revived by Kishi’s grandson, Abe Shinzō (prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020). As Abe’s protégé, Takaichi sees herself as heir to these dreams.

The structure of the Japanese electoral system and a long history of low voter participation in elections have given the LDP an extraordinarily dominant position in Japanese politics for the past seventy years; but despite this, the party has never managed to muster the parliamentary seats and public support needed to revise the postwar constitution. Constitutional revision requires the support of two-thirds of parliamentarians in both Japan’s Lower and Upper Houses, confirmed by majority support in a referendum. In response to these high barriers to revision, the ruling LDP has until now chosen the alternative path of steadily eroding constitutional restraints on military expansion by selectively ‘re-interpreting’ the words of the constitution.

So, despite the clear statements in Article 9 of the constitution that ‘land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained’ and that ‘the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized’, Japan is now listed by the influential ‘Global Firepower Index’ as having the seventh most powerful military in the world, and has the world’s sixth largest navy and airforce. For decades, this military power was limited by government assurances that Japan’s armed forces existed purely for self-defence in case of an attack by a foreign power, but this limitation, too, has gradually been eroded. Most notably in 2015, a new ‘Peace and Security Law’ opened the door to the overseas deployment of the Japanese military in response to any ‘existential crisis’ [sonritsu kiki] – a vague concept which could include such events as an economic blockade affecting Japan or an incident threatening the lives of Japanese citizens abroad. From 2017, the Japanese government embarked on a rapid program of expanding military spending, and in 2022 it announced a further expansion program which aims to make Japan’s military budget the third largest in the world (after the US and China) by the late 2020s. Yet the military gap between Japan and these superpowers remains vast, and this military expansion has been accompanied by promises to tie Japan ever more closely to the United States (including a promise by Prime Minister Takaichi to nominate US President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize).

With sufficient support from right-wing parties in the Upper House, the new Takaichi administration potentially has the capacity to push through a measure revising the Japanese constitution. It is uncertain whether a majority would support this in a referendum, but given high levels of anxiety in Japan about the rise of China and wider global instability, Takaichi may well be tempted to press ahead with constitutional change, hoping to gain the kudos of finally achieving the long-held dream of her nationalist predecessors.

Takaichi seeks to model herself on Britain’s late prime minister, the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher. But Japan’s prime minister appears to be an Iron Lady with feet of clay. Her nationalism (like that of her mentor Abe Shinzō) is satellite nationalism, always dependent on the reflected light of US military and economic power. Takaichi has very explicitly thrown in her lot with Donald Trump, but with the Trump administration embroiling itself in a chaotic conflict in the Middle East, the US administration is likely to have only limited interest in the Japanese government’s strategic priorities.

Though Takaichi may push ahead with constitutional change for symbolic reasons, efforts to change the constitution – which has remained unaltered for almost eighty years – could open a range of contentious and divisive debates about a variety of constitutional clauses, including those related to the role of the Emperor and the rights of minorities in Japan. Meanwhile, the Japanese prime minister’s skilful manipulation of nationalist rhetoric has fuelled increasing xenophobia in Japan at the very time when Japan, with its ageing and declining population, most needs to open its doors to migration and international mobility. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, whose neo-conservatism was built on fiscal constraint and social austerity, Takaichi’s government aims to spend its way out of economic stagnation: a strategy which will expand the nation’s massive public debt and fuel inflation.

Despite hawkish rhetoric both from the US and the Japanese administrations, what we are seeing in East Asia is an acceleration of the shift in the power balance towards China. With its repressive political regime, China has many internal problems, but it has avoided entanglement in foreign wars and has remained focused on expanding its economic and technological might. The Trump administration has hollowed out the postwar rules-based international order in which the US played the dominant role, and its reckless international behaviour is destabilising its own economy and those of its allies. For other smaller Asia-Pacific countries, the most urgent task now is to develop arenas of dialogue which can build foundations for a peaceful, cooperative and independent response to historic shift in global power balance which is currently underway: a new ‘Bandung-style’ response to twenty-first century great power conflicts. The current Japanese government’s policies risk isolating it from its Asian-neighbours, making it more difficult for Japan to play a significant role in these crucial processes of dialogue and cooperation, and leaving it tethered to a dangerously floundering and rapidly sinking superpower.