ABSTRACT
Japan enters the twenty-first century with the world’s oldest unrevised constitution (Kempō). The words of Japan’s supreme law remain as when first drafted, despite over fifty years of change through political interpretation.1 The circumstances in which it was drawn up and adopted are now plain. References in the Preamble to the ‘We, the Japanese people’ as the progenitors notwithstanding, its key principles were actually dictates from the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur’s allied high command, presented as a virtual ultimatum to the Government of Japan just half a year after it had surrendered to the Allies in August 1945.2 In the early months of 1946, Japan was a defeated, exhausted, occupied country, still at that time without any representative institutions. The constitution’s three central featuresthe ‘symbolic emperor’ system, popular sovereignty, and state pacifism-were non-negotiable demands imposed by the war’s victors.
