Yesterday was a national holiday of Japan celebrating the promulgation of our constitution in 1947.

No single word of the constitution has been changed or modified since then. It is a big body of the spirit of Japan where law prevails. No matter how the foreigners imagine about Japan and its past, Japan has declared its eternal abandonment of its right to fight with other countries by the armed force, and all the post-war generations has been taught the constitution is the country’s pride. The first draft was created by a team of US officers from GHQ, but its spirit is shared and accepted among Japanese as our standard language.

In 1950, Korean war broke out and the same US-lead GHQ ordered Japanese government to re-build its army. It was the beginning of the hard time for the Japanese government as the constitution was kept unchanged. While it clearly says we do not rely on any kind of military power, the reality implies it is a childish dream.

The existence of the Japanese military (or self-defence force,,) has been a good resource for China and Korea to show conflicts that they produce by themselves and unite their nations against the “enemy”. They keep sending hostile words to Japan while they keep receiving ODAs and other forms of financial assistances from Japan.

Even in a domestic political scene, the self-defence force has been a super-nice political agenda for the left-wing parties and the debate about its lawfulness has stopped our congress many times.

Now, our PM is trying to change the the country’s direction more clearly towards the so called “standard” nations. He thinks Japan should coop more positively with the global society for the peace which may include a military effort. I can understand his concern, and share a view that Japan must be a “positive” player for driving a peace.

However, here is my big question: “why don’t we Japan put more efforts on terminating the weapon exporting?”

We have to acknowledge the fact that almost every weapon exported to the developing world are manufactured by the permanent members of the UN Security Council. They are pretending they are fighting for the peace, it could be true, but why don’t they stop exporting the weapons? It will cease fires automatically as those weapon-importing countries usually have no weapon production facilities or have no ability to maintain it.

See this chart > US and Russia remain world’s biggest arms exporters – study

Japan must watch carefully on what is going on underneath. We are not fighting for a benefit of any specific country. We must fight for the better future where no war can happen as it is said in our constitution. It is how we can show our respect to the soldiers who lost their lives during WW2.