Prologue: When a Single Booth Disappeared
In June 2026, a Self-Defense Forces (SDF) public-relations booth was cancelled at Nagoya University’s campus festival, the “Meidaisai.” The plan was modest: panels on disaster-relief operations, a display of a high-mobility vehicle, and an “SDF-style fitness test” visitors could try. The student-run organizing committee had invited the SDF, and preparations had been carefully made.
Then the university staff union issued a statement demanding cancellation, calling it “a one-sided promotional activity that conceals the SDF’s essential nature as a military organization and instills a sense of ‘coolness’ and ‘reassurance’ in students and local residents.” The university administration asked the committee to cancel, citing “no guarantee the event could be held safely,” and the booth was dropped. The Ministry of Defense declared on its official X account that this was “extremely regrettable.”
On the surface, this reads as a clash of “the SDF versus its opponents.” But pause and trace the structure, and it turns out not to be a conflict about the SDF at all. It was a site where a single sickness in constitutional interpretation—the sickness of reading only “half” of Japan’s constitutional vision of security—surfaced in the form of whether one booth could exist. This essay argues exactly that.
As a first clue, note that the union’s stated grounds for demanding cancellation were, of all things, “peace.” The union cited the “Peace Charter” that Nagoya University adopted in 1987. And the preamble of that Peace Charter is very nearly a transcription of the preamble to the Constitution of Japan. The root of this conflict, in other words, lies in how one reads the constitutional preamble.
Part I: The Preamble as “Major Premise”
Not the “Renunciation” of Security, but a “Shift in How Security Is Achieved”
The core of the Japanese Constitution’s preamble on security is this passage from its second paragraph:
We, the Japanese people, desiring peace for all time (…) have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world.
This sentence has often been cited as the basis for an unarmed-pacifism reading: “abandon force and entrust ourselves to the goodwill of nations.” But follow the structure of the sentence precisely, and that is not what it says.
“Trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world”—this is a conditional clause, establishing a framework of cooperation as the foundation. And “have determined to preserve our security and existence”—this is the main clause, in which the preservation of security and existence is, far from renounced, explicitly resolved upon.
What the preamble shifted, then, was not security itself. It was the method by which security is achieved. It discarded “security completed by one’s own nation alone” and switched to “the active preservation of security grounded in cooperation among peoples.” What was renounced was isolationist self-defense, not safety as such.
This is a decisive fork in interpretation. The preamble’s security is neither passively buffeted by the external environment nor self-contained within the nation. It is conceived as something actively preserved, balanced within a framework of international cooperation. Self-defense, here, is a relational concept. It can only be defined within the web of trust relationships with other nations.
The Prohibition of Isolation, and the Duty of Equal Relations
The third paragraph of the preamble reinforces this:
We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations who would sustain their own sovereignty and justify their sovereign relationship with other nations.
Two things are stated here. First, the prohibition of an isolationism that thinks only of one’s own nation. Second—and this is easily overlooked—the declaration that “sustaining one’s own sovereignty and standing in an equal relationship with other nations” is the duty of every nation.
Neither unilateral isolation nor unilateral dependence. Maintaining sovereignty within a relationship of equals. This is the duty the preamble imposes.
The Right to Live in Peace—a Peace Achieved Through Cooperation
And then the right to live in peace, in the latter half of the preamble’s second paragraph:
We recognize that all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want.
What matters is that this is spoken of as the right of “all peoples of the world.” A peace achieved not through one nation’s defenselessness, but through the cooperation of the whole world. Both freedom from fear (security) and freedom from want (the socio-economic) are to be realized within the active enterprise of cooperation.
To sum up: the security the preamble depicts forms one clear vision. Grounded in a framework of cooperation, sustaining one’s own sovereignty and standing as an equal among nations, a nation actively preserves its security and existence. This essay calls that vision the “major premise.”
Part II: Only with the Major Premise Do Article 9 and Article 98(2) Come Alive
Once the preamble’s vision of cooperation is set as the major premise, Article 9 and Article 98(2) cease to be scattered provisions and acquire meaning, for the first time, as two operative clauses that bring this premise into force.
Article 9—Not “The Prohibition of Self-Defense” but “The Prohibition of Isolationist Force”
What Article 9 renounced was the use of force “as a means of settling international disputes.” Read under the major premise, Article 9 is understood as a clause prohibiting the unilateral, aggressive use of force that destroys the framework of cooperation. It is nothing other than the military-domain concretization of the preamble’s prohibition of the isolationism that “is responsible to itself alone.”
Article 9 did not deny the preservation of security itself. It denied force that breaks the framework of cooperation. It is precisely because the preamble exists as the major premise that Article 9 lives as a “prohibition of aggression” and does not run away into a “prohibition of self-defense.”
Conversely: it is because one reads the text of Article 9(2) in isolation, detached from the major premise, that “the non-maintenance of war potential” swells all the way into “self-defense is impossible,” and that famous fruitless debate is born. The source of “the fruitless debate over Article 9” lies in this one thing—reading Article 9 alone, severed from the major premise.
Article 98(2)—The Hinge Connecting the Preamble to the International Order
The treaties concluded by Japan and established laws of nations shall be faithfully observed.
Article 98(2) is often dragged out as “the basis clause for the right of self-defense,” and each time it draws the criticism: “Can a treaty subordinate to the constitution create a constitutional authority?” That criticism is correct, so long as Article 98(2) is used as a clause creating the right of self-defense.
But under the major premise, the role of Article 98(2) is entirely different. It is not the basis of the right of self-defense but a connecting device that brings the preamble’s vision of cooperation into legal operation. The preamble establishes the major premise that “security is preserved on the foundation of cooperation among peoples.” Article 98(2) is what imposes the duty to faithfully incorporate and observe, within Japan’s legal order, the contents of that framework of cooperation—the UN Charter, security treaties, arms-control treaties, established laws of nations.
Preamble (the ideal) → Article 98(2) (connection to the international legal order) → the concrete frameworks of cooperation, beginning with the UN Charter. In this chain, Article 98(2) lives as the hinge connecting the preamble to the international order. The source of the right of self-defense remains the inherent right of a sovereign state (the “inherent right of self-defense” of which the Supreme Court spoke in the Sunagawa case), and Article 98(2) guarantees that this right of self-defense is exercised within the framework of cooperation.
Thus the preamble, Article 9, and Article 98(2) form one integrated vision of security. It is because the major premise (the preamble) exists that Article 9 lives as the prohibition of aggression, and that Article 98(2)—which incorporates cooperation with other nations, the UN included—comes alive.
This Reading Has Already Been Shown by the Supreme Court
The integrated reading set out above is not the interpretation of one private individual. In its 1959 Sunagawa judgment, the Supreme Court spoke of pacifism as precisely this interlinkage of the three provisions. The judgment positioned Article 9 not as a standalone provision but as “a provision that, together with the spirit of international cooperation in the preamble and in Article 98(2), gives concrete form to pacifism, the distinctive feature of our Constitution.” “Together with”—Article 9 takes concrete form as pacifism only by operating reciprocally with the preamble and Article 98(2). Not reading Article 9 in isolation; setting the preamble as the major premise and reading Article 98(2) as the point of connection to international cooperation—the very skeleton of what this essay calls the integrated reading is declared by the judgment at its outset.
The judgment then locates the source of the right of self-defense in sovereignty. Article 9 renounced war and prohibited the maintenance of war potential, but “this in no way denies the inherent right of self-defense that our nation possesses as a sovereign state, and the pacifism of our Constitution by no means provides for defenselessness or non-resistance.” Citing the preamble, it holds that “to be able to take the measures of self-defense necessary to maintain its own peace and security and to sustain its existence must be said to be a matter of course as the exercise of a power inherent in the nation.” The reading in Part I of this essay—that what the preamble shifted was the method of achieving security, not security itself—is stated by the judgment in the negative form: “not defenselessness or non-resistance.”
(One caveat, stated in good faith. There is a strong understanding that this holding on the right of self-defense is obiter dictum rather than the principal reasoning of the judgment, and the Sunagawa judgment also has another face, the political-question doctrine. This essay therefore uses the judgment not as “a precedent that conclusively held the SDF constitutional,” but as an authority for the interpretive method—reading the preamble, Article 9, and Article 98(2) in an integrated way, and holding that the method of security may be chosen in response to the actual state of international affairs.)
Part III: Is the Status of the SDF Really “Unresolved”?
Standing on this integrated reading, one sees how inaccurate the conventional social belief that the SDF’s status is “unresolved” really is.
What Does the Law Say?
The right of self-defense, as UN Charter Article 51 expresses with the word “inherent right,” is not something the Charter created but a right a sovereign state naturally possesses. The Sunagawa judgment, too, derived the right of self-defense not by way of treaty but as an attribute of sovereignty. Article 9 does not deny this right. Therefore the maintenance of the minimum necessary force for self-defense does not amount to the “war potential” prohibited by Article 9(2)—this is the skeleton of the government’s interpretation.
And as the concrete organization of that force, the Self-Defense Forces Act was enacted. Article 3(1) of that Act defines the SDF’s primary mission as “the defense of our nation.” This is the SDF’s intrinsic role, one no other administrative agency can substitute for. Disaster relief is positioned, in the same article, as an incidental mission.
In other words, at the level of law, the essence of the SDF is defense, and disaster relief is not that essence. This hierarchy is operated stably.
Where Does the “Sense of Unresolvedness” Come From?
And yet, at the level of social cognition, the status of the SDF continues to be represented as an “eternal matter in dispute.” Why? Because the apparent discrepancy between the text of Article 9(2) (“land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”) and the existence of the SDF, combined with the unconstitutionality theory in academic doctrine, keeps reproducing a sense of unresolvedness.
And this sense of unresolvedness produces a strange inversion. The “defense” that is legally the essence is something the SDF finds hard to speak of head-on in public space. So it appears in the legally incidental guise of “disaster relief,” a face hardly anyone can object to. Recall that what was to be displayed at the Meidaisai was precisely disaster-relief panels and a vehicle.
The union then criticizes this manner of appearing as “one-sided promotion that conceals the essence.” Here is the circle. The very situation in which the SDF cannot bring its essence to the front invites the criticism of “concealing the essence.” The union says “it is hiding its essence”; the defender says “it is placed in a situation where it cannot speak its essence.” The two name the same state of affairs from opposite directions—condemnation and diagnosis.
The legal hierarchy of missions (defense is the essence) and the social possibility of appearing (only disaster relief can be shown) are inverted. This is the true nature of the “doubly mistaken state” in which the SDF is placed.
Part IV: Dissecting the Unconstitutionality Theory
For fairness, we must take on the strongest form of the SDF-is-unconstitutional theory. That theory is not monolithic. There are at least two.
The Naive Version—Treating the Force Itself as Unconstitutional
The position that “since Article 9(2) says no war potential whatsoever, a force is unconstitutional even if for self-defense.” Two questions strike home against it.
First, the problem of the means of realizing the right of self-defense. This position says “security can be achieved through diplomacy, international cooperation, and the UN’s collective security.” But the UN’s collective security has never, since the organization’s founding, realized its military core—a UN force based on the special agreements of Charter Article 43; it is easily paralyzed by the veto of permanent members; and even when it operates, it can move only after the fact, correctively. That the Security Council fell into dysfunction during the invasion of Ukraine, owing to the veto of the belligerent party, Russia, is the latest instance of this structural defect. This mechanism cannot concretely substitute for the core of self-defense: prior deterrence and initial response.
And this argument—”just entrust it to the UN’s collective security”—was rejected by name in the Sunagawa judgment. The preservation of security by “trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples,” the judgment holds, “is not necessarily limited, as the lower court held, to military security measures taken by an organ of the United Nations such as the Security Council; rather, so long as it is security for maintaining the peace and safety of our nation, our nation may choose, in response to the actual state of international affairs, whatever is recognized as appropriate, so far as it is a method or means suited to achieving that purpose.” “In response to the actual state of international affairs”—the means of self-defense are not limited to the UN, and one may choose what is appropriate in relation to the international situation. This runs in the same direction as this essay’s position—grasping self-defense not as closed within domestic interpretation but in relation to the external environment—and is at the same time a direct judicial negation of the naive unconstitutionality theory’s claim that “the UN alone suffices.”
Second, and more fundamentally, the self-contradiction of this position. Japan sits under the U.S. nuclear deterrent (the nuclear umbrella), hosts U.S. forces stationed in Japan, and depends to a considerable degree on U.S. military power for its own defense. If “self-defense by force is itself an unconstitutional evil,” then to enjoy the protection of another nation’s force—nuclear force, no less—in lieu of holding that evil oneself is merely the outsourcing of evil. Conversely, if one acknowledges the nuclear umbrella as “actually necessary,” one has affirmed the proposition that “Japan’s security requires deterrence by force,” and the grounds for treating only one’s own force as unconstitutional collapse. Unless one rejects the nuclear umbrella, the claim that “self-defense by force is unnecessary and unconstitutional” cannot stand.
The Sophisticated Version—the “Hollowing of the Minimum Necessary”
More formidable is the position that “we grant both the right of self-defense and force for self-defense; but the actual SDF has long exceeded the ‘minimum necessary.’” It lines up world-class defense spending, the scale and quality of equipment, the partial acceptance of collective self-defense, the possession of counterstrike capability—and argues that the “minimum necessary,” which the government has treated as the lifeline of constitutionality, has been hollowed out.
But here lies a decisive weakness. The “minimum necessary” is not a fixed value measurable by quantity. It is a relative, situation-dependent concept that changes according to what it is the minimum against. If the threat is large, the minimum is large too. So “having more defense spending than other nations” does not mean “exceeding the minimum necessary.” The minimum necessary is determined not by comparison with other nations but in relation to the threat one’s own nation faces. The enumeration of quantitative indicators is, in itself, political impression-making, not an argument for a constitutionality judgment.
The sophisticated theorist will counter here, shifting from quantity to “the government itself moved the qualitative brakes (exclusively defensive posture, limitation to individual self-defense, non-possession of offensive weapons) through reinterpretation.” This is not nitpicking. But—this argument, too, cannot escape vacuity, in that it debates the level of defense solely within the closed coordinate system of domestic interpretive consistency.
Self-defense is a relational concept. What regulates its level is not the consistency of one’s own interpretation but the external coordinate system of the adversary’s capabilities and the regional balance. To demand of domestic interpretation an “immovable brake that does not move even when the environment changes” makes sense only in a world where the adversary behaves in a fixed way. If, in a world where the adversary changes its capabilities, one’s own nation alone fixes its brakes, that is not a brake but self-binding. The unconstitutionality theory, through both naive and sophisticated versions, shares the blind spot of preaching diplomacy and cooperation while refusing to look squarely at the military element actually indispensable to that framework of cooperation—the U.S. force on which it depends.
Nor Is It “Limitless Buildup”—Balance Within the Framework of Cooperation
Yet we must not swing to the opposite pole. If we say “because it is determined by the external environment, the level may be raised in response to threats as they arise,” we arrive at the very situation constitutionalism most fears: the unrestrained swelling of power through the arbitrary expansion of threat perception.
So, precisely stated: the level of self-defense is not passively determined by the external environment. It is operated actively, balanced within a framework of international cooperation, with diplomacy at its center. Alliance relations, arms-control treaties, regional security dialogue, confidence-building measures—this web of cooperation functions as a structural constraint that keeps one nation’s level of self-defense from going limitless. There is indeed a brake. But that brake lies not in a line closed within domestic interpretation, such as the reading of Article 9, but within the open relationship that is the framework of cooperation.
And this—agrees, on the point of valuing diplomacy and cooperation, with the unconstitutionality theory’s own call to “value diplomacy and international cooperation.” They diverge on a single point. Whether to incorporate one’s own force into that framework of cooperation as one element, or to exclude it. The unconstitutionality theory preaches exclusion while in reality enjoying U.S. force as an indispensable element of the framework. Then the remaining difference is merely “whether to outsource all force to another nation, or to hold a part of it oneself.” And given the problems that full outsourcing entails—being protected by another’s nuclear weapons while keeping one’s own hands clean, depending for defense and thus lacking autonomy—it is far more coherent to position one’s own force within the framework of cooperation as an equal element.
Is this not precisely the spirit the preamble proclaims? “The duty of every nation to sustain its own sovereignty and stand in an equal relationship with other nations.” Neither full dependence (the dilution of sovereignty and equality) nor the renunciation of force (the abandonment of security preservation), but autonomous balance-operation within an equal cooperation. The proper form of the SDF is nothing other than the accurate implementation of the preamble’s vision of cooperation.
Part V: The Diet, Too, Has Repeated the Same Structure
Having read this far, one might think this is a matter peculiar to the university as a special venue. But the same structure is repeated in the Article 9 debate of the Diet itself, the highest organ of state power—in cross-section, in longitudinal section, and at the single contemporaneous point of June 2026, the same month as the Meidaisai.
Cross-section—When Pro and Con Camps “Satisfy Themselves” Among Their Own
In May 2012, the House of Representatives Commission on the Constitution debated Chapter II (Article 9) clause by clause. There, Shigeru Ishiba of the Liberal Democratic Party, having said he had reread all the postwar minutes, left a striking remark: there is no point in the pro camp gathering only among the pro camp and satisfying itself, and the con camp gathering only among the con camp and satisfying itself—is there not somewhere a point of contact for the argument? And, citing the preamble’s passage “trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world, [we] have determined to preserve our existence,” he noted that “this and Article 9 are a set,” and that “the provision for what to do otherwise is missing.”
This stands at almost the same place as this essay’s position. The integrated reading—reading Article 9 with the preamble as major premise—and the gap that this essay tried to fill with “balance-operation within a framework of cooperation,” namely the provision for when trust in cooperation is betrayed: a working specialist on security sees that gap in the same place. In the same debate, Rintaro Ogata (then of the Democratic Party) read UN Charter Article 51 not only in the authentic English text but in the French and Spanish texts, called the very dividing of individual from collective self-defense “the scholasticism of textual exegesis,” and rejected the “integration-with-force” theory as “purely a domestic Japanese matter that does not hold internationally.” This is a practitioner’s anticipation of what this essay called the vacuity of closing self-defense within domestic interpretation.
Longitudinal section—Over Fifteen Years, a “Migration” from Substance to Procedure
And yet the Diet spent fifteen years without finding that point of contact. Tracing the shift in the agenda composition of the House Commission on the Constitution, a clear pattern emerges. In 2012–13 it debated “the points of each chapter” clause by clause from Chapter I onward. But from 2014, the agenda shifted almost entirely to “issues surrounding amendment of the national-referendum law”—broadcast ads, internet ads, countermeasures against fake news, the public-information council—the debate over the “container,” that is, by what procedure to hold a referendum if the constitution were to be amended. And most recently, in 2024–26, it has concentrated on the periphery of the governmental structure: the “emergency-powers clause,” “election-impossible situations,” “extension of legislators’ terms.” The sessions that confront the content of Article 9 head-on have almost vanished.
This fifteen-year migration of the agenda confirms this essay’s central thesis through the Diet’s own body. Because the argument over the substance of Article 9 cannot be settled, the Diet has in effect given up on the substance and migrated to procedure and periphery. There is, however, an ironic reversal here. The “legitimacy of procedure” this essay speaks of was an affirmative procedure for legitimately adjudicating a clash of values. The procedure to which the Diet migrated, by contrast, has a strong character of retreat from the inability to reach substantive agreement. Even in the same “shift to procedure,” the former is an affirmative landing, the latter a backward detour. What should be asked is not the shift to procedure itself, but how that procedure legitimately adjudicates the clash of values.
Contemporaneous point—June 2026, the Commission Running Alongside the Meidaisai
And in the very month the SDF booth disappeared at the Meidaisai, on June 11, 2026, the House Commission on the Constitution had a referendum-law amendment on its agenda. A single festival booth and the constitutional-amendment debate of the highest organ of state power were running alongside each other at the same moment.
That day’s debate enacts this essay’s points almost verbatim. Shigeru Shindo of the LDP named the very situation this essay called “the true nature of the sense of unresolvedness,” saying “the SDF is said to be a military internationally but not a military domestically, which is hard to understand,” and explained that the LDP draft leaves Article 9’s paragraphs 1 and 2 intact in order to maintain the SDF’s positioning grounded in pacifism, the need for amendment lying in “the absence of a national-defense provision in the constitution.” The conception is not to change the content of Article 9 but to write in the procedure and control—who defends the nation and how, and how the force is controlled.
Meanwhile, within the ruling camp that ought to be on the same pro-amendment side, a conflict over the essence of Article 9 was exposed. Nobuyuki Baba of Nippon Ishin criticized the proposal shown by Yuichiro Tamaki of the DPP—”maintain paragraphs 1 and 2, and position the SDF as armed forces as an exception to them”—as “a contradiction in which the norm and the exception hold the same constitutional value,” and “paragraph 2 becomes a dead-letter ornamental clause,” citing UN Charter Article 51 to press the problem of “distorting the inherent right of self-defense with the strange theory of an exception to constitutionally prohibited war potential.” This is nothing other than the participants themselves denouncing what this essay called, in Part IV, the apparent instability of an equilibrium propped up by the interpretive technique of the minimum-necessary doctrine. “Sufficient and necessary as is” (Shindo) versus “a paper tiger as is” (Baba)—even within the pro camp, there is no agreement on the substance of Article 9. It is the most vivid instance of this essay’s diagnosis.
And in that day’s debate there was a statement that may be called this essay’s very conclusion. Koichi Kasai of the centrist reform coalition raised his faction’s basic stance on internet regulation in the referendum law—”we do not question the content, but we do question the means”—and, citing the EU’s regulation on the transparency of political advertising, proposed “a method that does not regulate the content of expression but illuminates the information environment by making clear who, for how much, with which country’s funds, and to whom transmitted.” Aoi Furukawa of Team Mirai likewise said the basis should be “not the state certifying what is true, but methods that do not constrain expression, such as securing transparency.” Toward the transparency of the procedure that adjudicates the clash of values, not the content of the values. The landing point this essay reached as speculation echoes, as a real-world echo, from the mouths of multiple factions in the Diet in the same month as the Meidaisai.
On the other hand, “half-reading” was alive and well too. Kimie Hatano of the Japanese Communist Party grasped Article 9 in the single facet of “renunciation of war, non-maintenance of war potential, denial of the right of belligerency” and held the U.S. forces in Japan to “directly contradict Article 9″—the reading, which this essay rejected by citing the Sunagawa judgment, that purifies into the renunciation of force without reading the preamble’s cooperative preservation of security. Conversely, Masamune Wada of Sanseito advocated “constitution-creation, rewriting from the preamble,” criticizing the current preamble as “grammatically odd, not grounded in the national essence and character.” One passes over half of the preamble’s cooperative principle; the other passes over the preamble itself.
A single festival booth and the constitutional-amendment debate of the highest organ of state power. In the same month of June 2026, the two sites were deeply connected at the single point of “the impossibility of substantive resolution.”
Part VI: Return to the Meidaisai—the Common-Root Sickness of “Half-Reading”
Let us return to where we began. Nagoya University’s Peace Charter transcribes, in its preamble, the constitutional preamble: “renouncing war and war potential, confirming the right to live in peace, [the people] enacted the Constitution of Japan.” The union’s cancellation statement, too, took this Peace Charter as its grounds.
And yet—the constitutional preamble they claim to inherit spoke of that right to live in peace as the right of “all peoples of the world,” that is, as something achieved through the cooperation of the whole world. It was conceived as the active preservation of security grounded in cooperation: “trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world, [we] have determined to preserve our security and existence.”
Both the Nagoya Charter and the union overlook this cooperative, relational core of the preamble and extract only the one facet of “renouncing war potential.” When they think that excluding the SDF from campus accords with the right to live in peace, they are not seeing the preamble’s active dimension—the duty to preserve security within cooperation.
What happened at the Meidaisai, in other words, can be rephrased thus: a pacifism that inherited only half of the constitutional preamble’s spirit (the renunciation of force) tried to exclude—without letting it speak its essence—an organization that ought to bear the whole of that spirit (autonomous security preservation within cooperation). This was a site of the preamble’s self-division. Those who raise the banner of the preamble’s spirit were reading only half of that spirit.
And one notices that every difficulty we have dissected reduces to a single cause. The fruitlessness of the Article 9 debate, the vacuity of the minimum-necessary argument, the self-contradiction of the unconstitutionality theory, and the confusion at the Meidaisai—all of it derives from removing the major premise that is the preamble and reading Article 9(2), or the minimum necessary, or domestic interpretation, in isolation. The sickness is one. “Half-reading the preamble,” or “isolated reading of the provisions.”
Conclusion: As Obedient Rebels, Reading the Preamble as a Whole
What, then, is the cure? To read the preamble, Article 9, and Article 98(2) anew—not as a clash of scattered provisions, but as one integrated vision of cooperative security. That is all.
At this point, another important shift occurs. All of the foregoing arguments, in the end, contested a substantive line-drawing—whether the minimum necessary was exceeded, what is neutral, what is the essence. But standing on the integrated reading, that is not what we should be asking.
Since the level of self-defense is dynamically adjusted as a balance within the framework of cooperation, the problem is neither “whether adjustment is possible” nor “where the line is.” The problem is: by what procedure, and by whom, is the legitimacy of that adjustment guaranteed? May a response to environmental change be settled by a cabinet decision—an interpretive change internal to the executive? Does it require the involvement of the Diet? Does it, ultimately, require constitutional amendment, the judgment of the sovereign people? The brake should be placed neither on an “immovable line” (the unconstitutionality theory) nor on “the government’s free adjustment” (a blank check), but on the legitimacy of procedure.
The Meidaisai lands in the same place. What was wrong with that cancellation was not “excluding the SDF” as such. For a national university to raise the value of anti-war pacifism can itself be a legitimate exercise of university autonomy. The problem is that the “autonomy of all constituent members”—the autonomous judgment of the student organizing committee—which the Charter raises in its fifth article, was overturned by the administration under the euphemism of “safety,” without the procedure being made explicit. Neutrality is not the absence of values. It is the transparency of the procedure that adjudicates a clash of values.
In both the SDF argument and the Meidaisai argument, the answer is isomorphic. Substantive line-drawing is vacuous; the essence lies in the legitimacy of procedure.
And here lies the most obedient and most rebellious response to convention—to the framework of opposition between defending and amending the constitution. To side neither with defense (the one facet of renouncing force) nor with amendment (its negation). To go beyond the “half-reading of the preamble,” the “isolated reading of provisions,” into which both have fallen, and to read the constitution anew as one integrated vision. Not to choose one side of the binary, but to step down from the very premise the opposition shares.
Neither to resist, nor to obey. But to transcend. That, I think, is the most faithful answer to the question that the disappearance of a single booth has put to us.