ABSTRACT
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, significant shifts occurred in the domestic deployment of the military in Western-style parliamentary democracies in Europe, North America and Australasia. In Japan, deploying military troops domestically to suppress civil unrest was placed back on the political agenda in 2018 when a leading figure in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party proposed allowing the military to be used to put down public unrest. The international character of the shift toward using the armed forces for domestic security makes it all the more important to critically examine the rationale and content of the measures. Some scholars have argued that concerns about the elevated role of the military in society are exaggerated or even unwarranted because one must trust elected governments to use the military for legitimate purposes only. The official rationale for the anti-terrorism measures asserts that the ‘war on terrorism’ requires a ‘new framework’ for considering civil liberties and the rule of law.
