Japan to Elect New Prime Minister Amid China Tensions

As Japan increases its regional leadership in combating geopolitical tensions with China, the next Japanese prime minister will decide the country’s future direction, including its China policy.
Current front runners include 43-year-old Shinjiro Koizumi, former minister of environment and the son of popular former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and 67-year-old former Minister of Defence Shigeru Ishiba. The election on Sept. 27 will determine the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the next prime minister of Japan.
“Whether Abe’s path will continue has become the focus [of the next leadership election],” Yaita told The Epoch Times.
Tsukasa Shibuya, a researcher at the Institute of World Studies at Takushoku University in Japan, told The Epoch Times that although Kishida took a firm stance against the Chinese regime, which is in line with the positions of G7 countries, it is still difficult to predict whether the next leader will continue such policies.
“It’s a part of the island chain that we militarily kept referencing,” Simon O’Connor, a former chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade in New Zealand, told The Epoch Times, referring to Japan. “It is a key area for American military operations as well.”
Shibuya said that the 43-year-old Koizumi’s exact position on China issues remains unclear. However, Yaita believes that Japan’s general trend of confronting the CCP will not change regardless of the winner of the leadership election. Still, Japan’s stance’s strength may differ among the candidates.
The LDP has generally supported revising Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution, which contains a no-war clause that renounces the use of military force to settle international disputes. Therefore, Japan’s military may only exercise self-defense when the country is under attack and is constitutionally banned from initiating military acts.
Abe and his successors have long called for revising the clause to allow Japan to take a more active role in defense and regional security in the face of threats from China and North Korea. However, the revision would require a supermajority in Japan’s parliament as well as a referendum.
Nevertheless, the Abe administration reinterpreted the constitution to include “collective self-defense,” which allows Japan to take military action when an ally is under attack. Japan has not defined which country other than the United States constitutes an “ally.”
“I think that strategic ambiguity has changed for Japan,” O’Connor said, “The Constitution used to be very clear, with a very defensive posture, but now they’re changing that. They clearly feel that there are some real threats that they need to be able to respond to.”