News Analysis: Abe's era as wannabe warmonger may be short-lived as nation unites, youngsters stand tall

Mass protests across Japan this weekend have delivered a clear and direct message to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that his plans to normalize Japan's military by way of unconstitutional legislation rammed through parliament are thoroughly and vehemently rejected by the public here, including growing numbers of youngsters, with political experts stating that the current trajectory of the prime minister and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, could lead to its eventual downfall.

At more than 300 locations across Japan, with the largest demonstration being held Sunday at the National Diet building in central Tokyo which attracted round 120,000 protestors, the nation stood united in a single chorus calling for Abe and his administration to honor Japan's decades-old war-renouncing Constitution and pacifist ideology and to scrap the controversial bills before they are enacted into law next month.

Marking the biggest demonstration against Abe's war legislation to date, people from all walks of life, including, most notably, vastly more young people, were represented in front and around the Diet building, reflecting the nation's singular view that not only should the bills be scrapped, but there is also a sense of crisis and urgency to see that this happens.

"This protest was especially significant when you consider that Japan is not typically a country that protests in this way and with this in mind I would venture that the government of (prime minister) Abe is now nervous about an ever-divergent public on the issue of the war legislation and Abe's heavy-handed way of pushing it through the lower house -- a public that is now angry and panicked about the situation and prepared to do something about it, " political analyst Teruhisa Muramatsu told Xinhua.

"The protests now are reminiscent of the protests we witnessed in the 1970s, but haven't seen in Japan since, and this is a clear sign that the entire country is hugely disgruntled and is demanding change and while Abe's position as the nation's and LDP leader is statistically secure for now, if public pressure continues to intensify, it will play into the hands of the opposition bloc, who were also well-represented at Sunday's massive demonstration," said Muramatsu.

The fact that major opposition party representatives, including their leaders, turned out in force for the protest, is a testament to how they're allying themselves alongside the public and in doing so garnering more and more support as that of the LDP plummets to an all-time low, in a bid to ensure that if and when the bills get passed in the upper house during the current extended Diet session through September, or are referred back to the lower house, where the ruling bloc holds a majority and will vote in the affirmative, the public backlash will be ferocious enough to ensure that faith in Abe and the ruling coalition will be irrecoverably eroded, Muramastu went on to explain.

Katsuya Okada, leader of the main Democratic Party of Japan ( DPJ), and Kazuo Shii, chairman of the Japanese Communist Party ( JCP), were the most prominent political figures at the protest, pledging to work together to pressurize Abe into abandoning the bills, with Okada stating that the public had gone into "crisis" mode and were extremely angry at Abe, while the JCP's Shii declared that the war legislation would be stopped as opposition to the bills continues to spread across the nation.

DPJ Secretary General Yukio Edano, at a separate protest, also blasted Abe, saying that if the prime minister were to now ignore the nation's calls to scarp the bills, he would simultaneously be ignoring democracy.

"The opposition camp is, in fact, gearing up for a leadership change. Abe thinks he'll steward the LDP through to the end of 2018, but the DPJ are eyeing a general election running simultaneously with the upper house elections next summer and the war bills issue has played nicely into the opposition camp's hands, " pacific affairs research analyst, Laurent Sinclair, told Xinhua.

"It may be an ambitious target, but this is exactly what the DPJ and other political party's opposed to Abe's war-related and constitution-revising policies should be doing: planning, expanding spheres of influence, winning back the public's hearts and minds and, where necessary, uniting with like-minded parties," Sinclair said, adding that for the longest time the opposition bloc had been somewhat toothless, eyeing just mere survival as opposition parties, rather than actively challenging for the leadership.

Both experts were also quick to point out that Japan's so-say apathetic youth, had come out in droves to support the anti-war move -- also reminiscent of the student protests in the seventies - - with the movement gaining weekly momentum through student civic groups, celebrities and opposition camp politicians, who have been quick to realize that following the legal age to vote being lowered to 18, there's a significant new demographic to target in bolstering their efforts to bring down the Abe regime.

Tetsuya Murata, a senior member of the Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (SEALDs), one of the main organizers of Sunday's demonstration, and a group that is receiving increasing media coverage of late for its anti-war campaign efforts, with its message spreading quickly among teens and twenty- somethings here, by way of popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, told Xinhua that young people in Japan are waking up to the threat that Abe and his administration pose to Japan, and that they were responsible for safeguarding the future of the country.

"While most of us are young we are well aware of what's going on in politics, thanks more to social media than convention media such as TV and newspapers. We can communicate with each other directly and interact in a language we all understand, and contrary to what seems to be popular belief both inside and out of Japan, youngsters here are prepared to stand up for what they believe in, meaning we will join forces physically and show our resistance to things we oppose," Murata said.

"There's a growing tendency among the younger generations in Japan nowadays to understand political issues for themselves and not just accept what is being reported on TV, in newspapers or taught in schools. The reality is really sinking in, that if these (Abe's) bills become law, we, the younger generation in Japan, may be expected to fight. If Abe can revise the Constitution so easily and without public support, who's to say that military conscription, for example, won't become a law in the future. We realize it's our job to stand together and say: 'No!' and to spread the word to our own networks of friends and their friends and so on, and for this to not only spread throughout Japan, but also overseas," the impassioned and clued-up, tech-savvy youngster said.

Along with globally-revered composer Ryuichi Sakamoto taking to the stand at Sunday's demonstration in Tokyo and declaring that he stood united with the majority of Japan in demanding that the spirit of the Constitution and its war-renouncing article 9 be upheld, other celebrities who perhaps have the ear of a younger audience have also come to prominence of late.

In a recent editorial on the matter The Japan Times reported on the popular idol group Seifuku Kojo Iinkai (Uniform Improvement Committee), which has been active for more than 20-years in Japan and has brought attention to a myriad of social issues from bullying and smoking, to stalking and peer pressure, as taking up the baton of late in a campaign against Abe, the LDP and the impending war bills.

"In June, the group (which currently consists of 10 members) fell out with the Yamato municipal government in Kanagawa Prefecture after singing songs that criticized Abe and the Liberal Democratic Party at an event endorsed by the city," the editorial said.

It highlighted one of the songs they sang which talks of the upper house election "lacking excitement," which is a direct swipe at the fact that Abe in the upcoming LDP party presidential election is almost guaranteed to be re-elected as no other candidates have stepped forward to challenge the hawkish leader. The song's lyrics also speak of TV broadcasts of politics being boring and politicians being liars. One line of the song refers to the LDP as, "the root of all evil."

"I couldn't believe how small-minded the LDP members were," the editorial quoted 17-year old band member Yuria Saito as saying. " All we did was criticize the LDP, not support a specific political organization or anything. We use our songs to point out what we think is wrong with the government. We sang about the Democratic Party of Japan, too," she said, having made it clear she thought the local government withdrawing its support for the band was ridiculous.

"We are the future of this country and for every mainstream group like Seifuku Kojo Iinkai, there are underground singers, musicians, artists, performers, comedians and young academics slowly but surely finding their political voices within their own networks and tribes and in doing so finding themselves and their call to action and this movement will spread as the tribes unite and like a virus we will destroy Abe, his cabinet and his whole administration, and engineer the change we demand," said a steely- faced Murata, "I can't say whether the skirmishes with the police on Sunday involved members of our group or not and we certainly don't condone violence, but such rare altercations with the police are a sign, I believe, of how high our passion is to stop Abe and the madness he's planning for Japan." Endi