On May 3, DPJ President Banri Kaieda issued the following statement.
Today marks the 66th anniversary of the promulgation of the Japanese constitution. We celebrate Constitution Memorial Day, remembering the history by which our current Constitution became the cornerstone of our nation’s post-war democracy.
The Constitution invests our sovereigns, the Japanese people, with the ability to exercise governmental authority in national functions and the like, as well as being a basic rule setting out the boundaries for such activities, putting them under scrutiny and controlling them. While practising the basic principles of “the sovereignty of the people, pacifism and respect for fundamental human rights” set forth in the Constitution, post-war Japan has overcome many obstacles to create peace and prosperity. This was due to the efforts of the entire nation, based on hard-work and conscientiousness, and is something we can be justly proud of on the world stage.
Now, as we face rapidly changing international and economic conditions, a Constitutional debate is occurring on a variety of points including national governance and national security, and global warming countermeasures. The current Constitution is not an inviolable code of law, and it is only natural that we should make additions if something is lacking and revisions if something needs to be revised. However, these must preserve the three principles of “the sovereignty of the people, pacifism and respect for fundamental human rights” contained in the current Japanese Constitution, and further build on the gains made by the Japanese people during the post-war period. From this perspective, we will make our “Proposal on the Constitution”, drawn up in 2005, more specific.
Currently, Prime Minister Abe is calling for us to “escape from the post-war regime”, and the Liberal Democratic Party and some other political parties are establishing provisions for a national army and “soldiers”, and calling loudly for revision of the Constitution, including obliging the people to fulfill their responsibility toward “the public good and public order” as a condition for obtaining their basic human rights, limiting the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and relaxing the provisions prohibiting the State and its organs from religious activity.
As a means of realizing such Constitutional revisions, revision of Article 96 of the Constitution, in order to lower the requirements needed for Diet approval of Constitutional revisions, is being considered. We believe that a condition for revisions to the Constitution, which is the nation’s highest law, should be that they take place having gained widespread public approval. It is getting things backward to relax the conditions regarding the number of Diet members needed to approve revisions simply because not enough Diet members support such revisions, while skipping the national debate and approval for the parts of the Constitution which should be preserved and the parts which are inadequate.
The Democratic Party of Japan will construct a future-orientated Constitution together with the Japanese people, based on the system in which the Emperor is the symbol of the State, in order to realize the basic spirit of the current Japanese Constitution, and to create a true constitutionalism based on freedom and democracy.