TOKYO — Japan’s voters on Sunday helped Prime Minister Shinzo Abe move closer to securing the lawmaker support he needs to revise a pacifist constitution that U.S. occupiers created in 1947.
All major Ja panese newspapers reported that the governing coalition and its allies had captured twothirds of the seats in the upper house of Parliament, the amount required to proceed with the constitutional revision. A final count was likely to be announced this morning.
“This is the people’s voice letting us firmly move forward,” Abe said.
When asked whether he would proceed with a revision of the constitution, he said it had long been the goal of his Liberal Democratic Party to overturn Article 9, the constitutional clause that calls for the complete renunciation of war. The Liberal Democrats have also proposed amendments that could limit speech deemed dangerous to the public interest and expand emergency powers for the prime minister.
Although Japan limits its military to a self-defense role, it still has a well-equipped modern army, navy and air force that work closely with the United States, a key ally. Many members of Japan’s military don’t anticipate becoming involved in overseas wars, expecting that their work will be limited to disaster relief.
But some Japanese support changing the constitution because of fears about terrorism, the recent missile launches by North Korea, and China’s claims of territory in the South China Sea.
The campaign rarely focused on constitutional changes, causing opposition lawmakers to accuse Abe and the Liberal Democrat Party of hiding their agenda.
“A vote for the LDP is a vote to destroy Article 9,” Communist Party leader Kazuo Shii said before the election. “Mr. Abe is trying to create a country that fights wars overseas. … We must not allow this.”
Abe kept the campaign focused on his economic program, called Abenomics, which centers on easy lending and a cheap yen to encourage exports. Abe also wants to expand the gross domestic product from $5 trillion to $6 trillion — about a third of the U.S. economy’s gross domestic product.
“I think this means I am being told to accelerate Abenomics, so I want to respond to the expectations of the people,” Abe told the Tokyo Broadcasting System after early results were announced. He promised new government spending that he said would help wrest the economy out of the doldrums in a “total and aggressive” way.
He declined to give the amount for the spending. He also said discussions should start on changing the constitution to work out details.
The Liberal Democrats have ruled Japan almost continuously since World War II. The few years the opposition Democratic Party held power coincided with the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters in northeastern Japan, and the party fell out of favor after being criticized for its reconstruction efforts.
There had been no possibility for a change of power in this election because Abe’s ruling coalition already controls the more powerful lower house.
Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo, said the unpopularity of Japan’s Democratic Party was a big factor in the Liberal Democrats’ win.
“I think people are unhappy, but they don’t really see that voting is going to make things different,” Kingston said. For Abe, he said, “the ace up his sleeve is the opposition.”
Kingston added: “There is not an alternative. This is as lukewarm a sense of support as you get.”
LOW TURNOUT
Loyalty to the Liberal Democratic Party runs deep, a product of habit and history as much as support for its policies.
Junko Kaneda, 84, who walked by herself through sweltering heat Sunday to vote at a polling station in Nakano, a neighborhood in western Tokyo, recalled hiding in bomb shelters during World War II air raids. She said she was concerned about the Abe administration’s moves to revise the constitution and expand Japan’s military powers.
“But in the end,” she said, “I think all we can rely on is the LDP.”
Jiro Yonehara is a company employee, or “salaryman,” who voted Sunday.
“I voted hoping the economy of the country gets better,” Yonehara said. “I think the economy is still hitting bottom, and I hope it gets better even just a bit so that my life gets easier.”
Some Japanese voters who selected opposition candidates Sunday did so less out of passion than out of protest.
“I didn’t vote for positive reasons,” said Miu Okada, 30, an office worker in Nakano who said she chose a candidate who was not a member of the Liberal Democratic Party or its allies.
Sunday’s election was the first in which 18- and 19-yearolds were allowed to vote in Japan. Minori Hosaka, 18, a computer engineering major at Tokai University in Tokyo, said he was not voting because he had not had time to move his residency from his hometown to Tokyo. Besides, he said, “I am not sure my own single vote can affect anything.”
As in previous elections, voter turnout was low. Early estimates put it at just under 55 percent, only slightly higher than results three years ago in the previous upper house election.
Robert Dujarric, professor and director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University Japan in Tokyo, said the Liberal Democrats’ win reflected voters’ disenchantment with the opposition, rather than their excitement about Abe’s policies.
“The public is old. It doesn’t want change,” he said, noting that Japan’s median age of 46 is one of the oldest in the world.
Abe had two electoral setbacks on Sunday. His Okinawa minister, Aiko Shimajiri, lost her seat on the tropical island. Residents have protested the U.S. military bases there after the indictment of a base worker in the rape and murder of an Okinawan woman earlier in the year. Justice Minister Mitsuhide Iwaki also lost his seat in Fukushima, where the cleanup after the 2011 nuclear disaster has been slow.
Information for this article was contributed by Motoko Rich, Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno of The New York Times; by Yuri Kageyama of The Associated Press; and by Isabel Reynolds, Emi Nobuhiro, Colin Keatinge, Keiko Ujikane and Maiko Takahashi of Bloomberg News.
Abe kept the campaign focused on his economic program, called Abenomics, which centers on easy lending and a cheap yen to encourage exports.