Potential Abe successor speaks out against Japan’s defence bills

TOKYO — A possible rival for the leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party spoke out against his plans to expand the role of Japan’s military.

“To tell the truth, that’s a question mark,” Ms Seiko Noda said in an interview yesterday (July 29) when asked whether she backed bills to enable Japan’s armed forces to defend allies. “Lawmakers who are practically defence nerds are suddenly flinging these unfamiliar ideas at the public.”

Ms Noda, who’s been mentioned as a candidate to become Japan’s first female prime minister, is only the second senior Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmaker to criticise the legislation.

With Japan embroiled in a territorial dispute with an increasingly assertive China, Mr Abe pushed the bills through the lower house of parliament earlier this month against public opinion. His support rate has tumbled and thousands of people have taken to the streets of Tokyo to protest the changes.

A former chairwoman of the LDP’s general council, Ms Noda temporarily left the party a decade ago after a dispute with then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over the privatisation of the postal services. She said she wouldn’t try to stop the security bills that are set to be enacted by September. Instead, she’d seek to change them later to reflect public opposition to Mr Abe’s reinterpretation of the pacifist Article 9 of the post-war constitution.

“Japan is appreciated because we have passed the last 70 years under Article 9 without killing anyone,” Ms Noda, 54, said at her offices in central Tokyo. “We should see this as a badge of honour.”

She criticised the government for failing to explain the new policies to the public. She singled out a recent TV appearance in which Mr Abe compared the concept of defending other countries to helping extinguish a fire in a neighbour’s house that threatened to spread to one’s own home.

“It’s not a fire,” she said. “Thinking you can compare it to a fire because the public doesn’t understand is just making fun of them. It actually makes it even harder to understand.”

DOMESTIC FOCUS

While domestic media have speculated that Ms Noda might run against Mr Abe in a September party leadership election, she said she had no plans to stand “as of today”. She listed a number of lawmakers, including Mr Shigeru Ishiba, minister for regional revitalisation, and Mr Koizumi’s son, Mr Shinjiro, as qualified to run for the post.

In a poll published by the Sankei newspaper earlier this month, 26 per cent of respondents said Mr Abe was the best-qualified person to lead Japan, with 9.3 per cent opting for Mr Ishiba and 1.3 per cent for Ms Noda. About 36 per cent said no politician was suitable.

Ms Noda said that Mr Abe shouldn’t try to stay on as premier through to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and should stand down in 2018 after two, three-year terms as party president to make way for a leader with a more domestic focus.

“His support rate has fallen so far that it’s more a question of whether he can get through the upper house election” in July next year, she said. BLOOMBERG