ABSTRACT
Chinese policy makers and scholars who should and do indeed know better, typically argue and indeed warn that Japan is on the brink of once again becoming an aggressive power threatening Chinese national security and territorial integrity. Japan’s nationalist and revisionist Prime Minister Koizumi not only wanted to terminate the, at times, very awkward debate on collective self-defence by officially allowing Japanese soldiers to execute that right abroad, but also put constitutional revision at the very top of his domestic policy agenda when he took office in April 2001. In 1967 the Japanese government issued the so-called Three Principles on Arms Exports, which banned weapons sales to communist countries, countries involved in international conflicts and countries subject to United Nations sanctions. Japan does not authorize its armed forces to execute the right to collective self-defence, arguably the basis of ‘real world’ military co-operation.
