This passage, drawing on Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State, questions the postwar reality in which Japan was subjected to America’s “policy of eradication,” under which military power and military institutions were thoroughly eliminated.
By contrasting Japan with the South Korean Constitution, which both rejects aggressive war and clearly defines the mission of its armed forces, it sharply exposes the abnormality that the Self-Defense Forces, supported by an overwhelming majority of Japanese citizens, are still not explicitly recognized in Japan’s current Constitution.
It is an important argument calling for a fundamental reassessment of Japan’s Constitution and national security if the country is to stand as a truly independent nation.

2019-05-26
Although the current Constitution does not explicitly mention the Self-Defense Forces, which are supported by more than 90 percent of the Japanese people, does it not trouble us that this condition has been left untouched for so long? Is that the result of clinging for seventy years to America’s policy of eradication?

According to The Soldier and the State, the celebrated work by Samuel Huntington, one of America’s leading political scientists, America’s military policy.
The chapter I published on 2016-12-06 under that title entered the real-time top ten this morning.
It is an essay that makes one recognize anew that Yoshiko Sakurai is one of Japan’s true treasures.
What follows is Yoshiko Sakurai’s article carried yesterday on the front page of the Sankei Shimbun.
All emphasis in the text, other than the headline, is mine.
A Break with the Policy of Eradication.
According to The Soldier and the State, the celebrated work by Samuel Huntington, one of America’s leading political scientists, American military policy can be reduced to two approaches: the “policy of eradication” and the “policy of transformation.”
He analyzed the former as a policy that eliminates military power and military institutions.
The latter is a policy that reconstructs the military system along liberal lines.
Huntington pointed out that toward defeated Japan, the United States adopted the most extreme policy of eradication, and he referred to Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution, which “forbade the possession of land, sea, and air forces and renounced recourse to war as a means of national policy.”
Japan’s task is how to break away from this policy of eradication.
It was already forty years ago that Huntington identified two challenges: the possession of sufficient military power capable of fulfilling the duty of national defense, and the maintenance of civilian control to restrain any rush toward militarism.
Even South Korea possesses the two essential elements of a state that he identified.
That is, Article 5 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea clearly renounces aggressive war, while at the same time stipulating that “the armed forces shall carry out the sacred duty of national security and national defense.”
Japan remains far behind even South Korea and the international community, but is that really acceptable?
Although the current Constitution does not explicitly mention the Self-Defense Forces, which are supported by more than 90 percent of the Japanese people, does it not trouble us that this condition has been left untouched? Is that the result of clinging for seventy years to America’s policy of eradication?
The changes in the United States, which has served as Japan’s backing, are accelerating under the next president, Donald Trump.
To be continued.