A 2018 examination of the Cruz Report on U.N. peacekeeping, Japan’s PKO Five Principles, Article 9, the South Sudan SDF daily-log controversy, and the question of constitutional revision in postwar Japan.

2018-06-29
UN Peacekeeping, Article 9, and the Limits of Japan’s PKO Five Principles — The Cruz Report and the Reality of International Security
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The Reality of the International Community
The May 31 morning edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on a study of United Nations peacekeeping operations commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
The report contains striking statements to the effect that hostile forces understand no language other than force and that nobody attacks an opponent stronger than themselves.
These words, contained in what became known as the Cruz Report, reflect the harsh reality confronting United Nations peacekeepers in the field.
To me, the conclusion drawn from decades of U.N. peacekeeping experience is unmistakable: peace cannot always be maintained by words alone, and at times sufficient military strength is indispensable.
This reality directly challenges the arguments of those who insist on preserving Japan’s present Constitution while refusing to confront the realities of international security.
From 2017 into 2018, the Diet was repeatedly consumed by controversy over the Ground Self-Defense Force’s daily activity logs from South Sudan.
Opposition parties and some sections of the media concentrated on the concealment of those logs and on the use of the word “combat,” pursuing those issues while, in my view, losing sight of the essential question.
Japan’s Five Principles for participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations were devised under the constraints imposed by Article 9 of the Constitution.
But those principles cannot simply be applied unchanged to the harsh realities of an actual deployment area.
The contradiction is obvious.
SDF personnel in the field must record what actually happens before their eyes.
Yet even though they know that they must leave an accurate record, using the word “combat” to describe what actually occurred can itself raise questions about whether the legal conditions for Japan’s continued participation in the mission are still being met.
Will the Japanese government repeat the same mistake the next time the United Nations asks Japan to dispatch the SDF to a dangerous peacekeeping operation?
Genuine international cooperation and international contribution will remain impossible unless Japan fundamentally changes the way it thinks about these matters.
Yet the consistent argument of advocates of constitutional revision—that Japan must have a constitutional and legal framework capable of functioning in the real international community—has never been widely accepted in postwar Japan.
When I consider why this is so, I am reminded that, since Eto Jun’s Closed Linguistic Space, many books have pointed to the brainwashing of the Japanese people under the GHQ occupation.
Yet remarkably little has been written about how that brainwashing can actually be undone.
I have focused precisely on the question of how to free the Japanese people from that brainwashing, which has become the core of what I call the disease of “anti-Japanese” thinking.
After tracing the postwar changes in public opinion polls concerning the Constitution, I became convinced that constitutional revision is possible if the Japanese people can be freed from this brainwashing.
Shiro Sakaiya, then a professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, examined the long-term development of public opinion on constitutional issues in postwar Japan.
He concluded that voters would not necessarily reject the kind of amendment to Article 9 advocated by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—an amendment that would preserve the existing provisions while explicitly recognizing the Self-Defense Forces.
Once the Constitution is actually amended, the “faith” in the Constitution, which has come to be treated almost as a sacred scripture, will begin to weaken.
Two years earlier, the United Kingdom held its referendum on withdrawal from the European Union.
Contrary to most expectations, the Leave side prevailed.
In my view, one reason was that many British citizens were moved from “reason” toward “emotion” by false or misleading information that stirred anti-EU sentiment.
The same problem will arise when constitutional revision is debated in Japan.
Supporters of the present Constitution will appeal not only to logic but also to emotions, using expressions that equate constitutional revision with a return to war.
I believe that devising a strategy to free people from this kind of mind control is the most important countermeasure available to advocates of constitutional revision.
This article continues.