30,000 people rally outside Japan's Diet against war legislation, extension of Diet session

About 30,000 protesters on Wednesday surrounded Japan's Diet building to express their strong opposition against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to push for a series of security-related bills and the extension of Diet session.

The current Diet session is scheduled to end Wednesday, however, in a bid to enact the controversial security bills, Abe and Komeito leader Natsuo Yamaguchi decided Monday to extend it by 95 days to Sept. 27, the longest extension in postwar history.

Regarding the move, demonstrators demanded that the current Diet session end immediately. Shouting slogans like "withdraw security legislation," "Step down, Abe," the protesters said that on the "war legislation" issue, Abe acted as a dictator who would drag Japan into armed conflicts again if the war bills passed in the Diet.

Leaders from the opposition parties also took part in Wednesday 's rally. Japanese Communist Party Chairman Kazuo Shii said that even though the Diet session is extended, "the fact that those security bills go against Japan's Constitution will not change."

Akira Nagatsuma, from Japan's major opposition Democratic Party of Japan, said that Abe has not learned a lesson from the past war and queried the prime minister's ability to make right decision as the highest leader of Japan's Self Defense Forces.

Abe is seeking to lay the legal basis for the SDF to exercise the right to collective self-defense through the new security- related legislation package, but the Japanese war-renouncing Constitution clearly bans the country from defending other countries, or the right to collective defense.

A survey conducted recently also showed that 81.4 percent of the Japanese population believe the government's explanations about the security-related bills are "not sufficient," while only 14.2 percent feel the opposite. Endi