Abe aims to unchain Japan from the postwar regime

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has waited for the right time to show his hand. And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, by test-firing missiles and threatening to conduct another nuclear test, has given Abe the ruse.

Abe has finally unveiled his timetable for giving "a newly reborn Japan" a new Constitution: 2020. His announcement came on Wednesday when the country observed the 70th anniversary of the Constitution that unequivocally renounces war as a sovereign right of Japan and the threat to use or the use of force as means of settling international disputes.

Addressing fellow conservative lawmakers, Abe said Article 9 needs to be amended in order to include a provision to give Japan's current quasi-army, the Self-Defense Forces, a constitutional status. And he claimed it was one of his generation's missions to make the SDF "constitutional".