Takaichi riding 'Trojan horse' to overcome postwar restraints on remilitarization: China Daily editorial

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is campaigning like a hardened gambler who believes momentum itself is a moral argument. Wearing a poker face, she keeps pushing the country's money into ever riskier bets — convinced that confidence is destiny and history merely an inconvenient footnote. With polls pointing toward a snap election victory in the lower house that she dissolved late last month, Takaichi has chosen this moment to revive her long-cherished ambition: rewriting Japan's Constitution to explicitly recognize the Self-Defense Forces. She sells it as the realization of an inevitability. To Japan's neighbors — and to anyone who takes history seriously — it is political adventurism dressed up as "confidence".

The language is soothing; the implications are not.

Article 9 of Japan's postwar Constitution is not an anachronism accidentally left behind by bureaucrats in 1947. It is the moral and legal dress code for Japan's return to the international community after World War II. Along with the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, it codified a hard truth: Imperial Japan inflicted untold suffering across the Asia-Pacific with its aggression, and preventing its return is not optional. Pacifism was not imposed to humiliate Japan; it was the prerequisite for trust.

That is why Japan's constitutional revision has never been a purely domestic matter. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian put it, Japan's neighbors — and the wider international community — have every reason to pay close attention. Reflection on history, respect for the desire for peace among Japan's own people, and adherence to peaceful development are not rhetorical flourishes. They are part of the political and legal foundations of postwar stability.

Takaichi treats those foundations as obstacles to Japan's "revival". She speaks of "deadlock" in the Diet, blames opposition control of the constitutional review committee, and insists that only a larger ruling-coalition majority can "break through" the impasse. The Constitution is cast as an annoying traffic light on red while she is late for an appointment with destiny. A snap election, called unusually early and with a compressed timeline, reinforces the impression that procedure is being rushed to serve ideology.

The sales pitch is familiar: Japan faces "external threats", therefore Japan must become a "normal" military power. Japan's right-wing forces have grown adept at disguising the reentry of militarism under the language of "responsibility", "security" and "popular support" — a rhetorical costume change that aims to hide the underlying naked ambition.

What is missing, conspicuously, is reflection. Japan has never sincerely apologized for or compensated the victims of its wartime aggression. Instead, some leaders continue to pay homage at the Yasukuni Shrine, where multiple war criminals are enshrined, bristle at historical accountability and repeatedly attempt to "sanitize" the past — including by doctoring history textbooks. You cannot sprint toward remilitarization while tiptoeing around remorse and expect to win trust.

In China alone, Japan's brutal invasion from 1931 to 1945 inflicted indescribable suffering. About 35 million Chinese military personnel and civilians were killed or injured, accounting for roughly one-third of all casualties in World War II across all nations. Calculated at 1937 prices, China suffered more than $100 billion in direct economic losses and approximately $500 billion in indirect losses.

There is little doubt the Takaichi government is leaving no stone unturned to accelerate militarism's return through the side door, cloaked in "electoral legitimacy". Constitutional revision may be marketed as technical housekeeping, but its spillover effects are profound. It loosens postwar constraints, shifts military boundaries and threatens regional peace.

There is also the matter of cost. Japan's military spending has surged, with official budgets committing the country to defense outlays nearing 2 percent of GDP, a level reached two years in advance thanks to the Takaichi government's push. This buildup is unfolding while Japan already carries public debt exceeding 230 percent of its GDP. At home, households are squeezed by inflation, falling real wages and a persistently weak yen. Markets have noticed. Bond yields have climbed. Investors flinch when ideology starts writing checks that arithmetic cannot cash.

Yet Takaichi talks breezily about the "benefits" of a weak currency and expansionary spending, as if economic gravity were optional. Defense buildup, fiscal loosening and constitutional revision are bundled into a single narrative of "national revival" — strength without sacrifice, pride without reckoning. History shows such packages never deliver what they promise.

An election victory could hand Takaichi's coalition a two-thirds supermajority, enabling constitutional revision even over upper house resistance. That concentration of power should give the region pause, especially as it will be in the hands of an irresponsible leader with hawkish instincts. This is not alarmism. Constitutional change in Japan is, by definition, regional business. It reopens wounds that never fully healed and signals that the postwar settlement anchoring East Asian stability is now negotiable.

Takaichi's gamble is that popularity can outrun memory, and that electoral applause can substitute for accountability. But the victims of Japan's war crimes remember where that logic leads. The rest of the world should resist the temptation to look away while the dice are still rolling.