ABSTRACT
This chapter’s main focus is the 2015 Diet debates on collective self-defense. The chapter shows that the contentious issue of collective self-defense polarized the political scene into pro- and anti-Abe camps, which temporarily transcended the traditional security discourses. While the anti-Abe camp sought to link Abe and his followers to militarism and war, the pro-Abe camp sought to portray itself as the true representative of the ‘peace state.’ It did this through a discursive rearticulation of the peace state that made it far more compatible with historical revisionism and the use of force than the traditional Yoshida Doctrine understanding of the term allowed. The chapter argues that the main contention between the two camps was not the question of collective self-defense, but rather from which past—prewar or postwar—contemporary Japan should be differentiated.
This chapter loosely spans the 2010s, but the focus is mainly of the debate on collective self-defense in 2015. Most of the Diet statements in this chapter are derived from the Budget Committee debates of March 2015.
