You can't defend yourself against the local bully, with your hands tied behind your back; other than say, pleading guilty to, bringing your jaw into forceful contact with his fist, or your tortured trembling testicles, into even more forceful contact with his knee.
The Chinese are fairly spitting chips, because they wanted to remain unchallenged and able to expand where they wanted, or annex any territory they wanted, as very small bites too small to bring the international world, into their backyard and boxing their ears!?
So who are the barbarians, taking other nations' territories, and completely ignoring their human rights, or murdering unarmed civilians, who dare practice a non sanctioned religion or meditation; or cross borders, if only to alert others, to what some very powerful people are or were doing in the name of nationhood?
Any atrocity remains an atrocity, whether committed in conflict or so-called peacetime, or inside alleged national borders!
I'm gland the Japanese, our allies, have taken the self imposed handcuffs off, and and now taking a far more aggressive posture, and able to defend their interests outside their borders, where that's appropriate.
Someone has to be able to stand up, and say to the territory gobbling Chinese, thus far and no further!
Moreover, we venerate our war dead, even where we now finally admit, we were in the wrong, and in the wrong war, for all the wrong reasons! So why shouldn't the Japanese?
And who else was bombed into submission by nuclear weapons, rather than more honorable conventional warfare?
Surely they, our WW1 allies and current allies, have a greater right to venerate their war dead than any other nation on the planet, given what they were asked to finally endure!
Even as a peace treaty, and or, a cease fire, was on the table?
One notes, our infantry, also have a rising sun emblem, as their hat badge!
We who always see our defense force as honorable warriors, should be able to honor other honorable warriors, conferring the same rights, even on those we fought against?
Rhrosty

I recall someone saying some 40 years ago that the Eagle & the Bear will eventually unite against China. Is that time approaching now ?

Given the harassment the Eagle is currently doling out to the Bear, not to mention to the Peacock and myriad others, I think it far more likely that the Bear and the Dragon will unite against the Eagle.

My thoughts exactly, Rhrosty.

>>You can't defend yourself against the local bully, with your hands tied behind your back; other than say, pleading guilty to, bringing your jaw into forceful contact with his fist, or your tortured trembling testicles, into even more forceful contact with his knee.<<

It is close to seventy years since Japan was the bad boy of Asia. Does the author believe that it should be another i) five ii) ten iii) fifty, iv) hundred v) thousand years before a sovereign nation is once again allowed to defend themselves in the same manner as practically every other country in the world?

Seventy - effectively three generations - is reasonable, in my view.

Well, 70 years on & who are the bad boys now ? Those who told us then that the Japanese & Germans were bad. Look at how they manage everything. The bad boys of then are laughing at them. Some masses simply have no foresight whatsoever.

Rhrosty,

"And who else was bombed into submission by nuclear weapons, rather than more honorable conventional warfare?"

An "honourable invasion" of the Japanese home islands could haven resulted in hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties and perhaps millions of Japanese civilians, what's honourable about that?

Also the 'reinterpretation' of the Japanese constitution seems rather sinister, I'm sure the Koreans and Chinese won't take a sanguine view of the development. Are you sure that the Japanese are formally our allies? Whatever China's real or perceived threats to East Asia, a bellicose Japan is very bad news indeed, any incident between Japan and China has the potential to involve the US, then its loyal little ally, Australia.

A very brief history of interpretation of Article 9 in post-war Japan: To divide post-war Japanese politics into two camps can be misleading but can serve as an explanation easy and simple to understand. There were two opposing interpretations because there were two opposing camps, a kind of the domestic Cold War, which were pro-American and anti-American.
The latter was pro-communist, more often than not pro-Chinese rather than pro-Russian. The latter group thought that the article 9 literally prohibited any sort of armed forces and therefore it thought that the post-war Self-Defense Forces were against the Japanese Constitution.
The former, conservative group thought that the 9th article did not prohibit the forces for self-defence.
The supreme court of Japn gave the verdict in 1959 that the article did not deny Japan's right to self-defence, and that the Self-Defence Forces were constitutional. To be continued.

The constitutionality of the right to self-defence and the Self-Defence Forces was cleared. Now as I understand, there are two kinds of right to self-defence, individual self-defence and collective self-defence. The conservatives have held power almost without a break in post-war Japan; the government has been almost always in their hands.
The interpretation of collective self-defence by the government, namely by conservatives, (not the interpretation or the verdict by the supreme court,) though they have been divided on many issues, particularly when it comes to security affairs, has been that Japan has the right to collective self-defence but does not have the rigth to excercise it. Funny or unfunny?

What Abe did was not the wholesale reinterpretation of the article 9, but the change to the erstwhile interpretation that Japan cannot excercise the collective self-defence right. Perhaps to be continued.

Ah so... new US base in Mandorah, proposed US naval fleet repair facility in Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, nuke repository on hold now that Muckaty Creek went 'pear shaped'...what next? Ah so, not so secret Secret Spy facility upgrade to Kojarena...mebbe a revamp of Jindalee Radar (JORN site) at Humpty Doo, and others down the west coast now that the MH370 intel gathering exercise of inviting Chinese surveillance aircraft and attendant technolgy in for the "...look see what we can find..." has been and gone.

Cheep cheep Toyotas, cheep cheeper Sanyos, tellies and consumer crap, and the good Samurai folk won't have to munch on green glowing burgers from Fukashima cows anymore. Win-Win situation hey?

Bit scary though imagining how close an unmanned, remotely flown aircraft the size of a 757 actually came to our coastline without being "challenged".

Had heard that the Harold Holt case was being investigated again, apparently a crocodile was found in Mary River with a black box flight recorder, and a diving cylinder inside it.

Will it be known as the JANZUS Alliance?

According to the erstwhile interpretation of the article 9, which admitted that Japan had the right to collective sel-defense but denied the right for actually excercising it, Japan could not attack China or North Korea if and when one or two of them attacked the US while the US was under the treaty obligation to attack one or two if Japan was attacked.

As for the territorial issue of the Senkaku Isles, the little known fact is that the Japanese Self-Defence Forces have superiority both at sea and in air. All China can do is to compete in verbal contest, and as perhaps everybody admits, China has much superiority and Japan is at great disadvantage; China has thousands of years' tradition of propaganda.

No country is so much exposed to international and world-wide misunderstandings and prejudices for such a long time as Japan in so far as the World War II is concerned.

If I said, as I do, that Japan was not a totalitarian country even in the 1930s, would I be denying its aggressive past? If I said, as I do, that Tojo was not a dictator, would I be telling a lie?

All those misunderstandings and prejudices arise from the presupposed and never-questioned equation of Nazi Germany = militaristic Japan. Already even in wartime Japan, "traditonal concepts had already been deeply modified by Western attitudes. Confrontation with the West in a bloody and protracted war created a cultural dilemma which could not be solved (Ben-Amy Shillony, Politcs and Culture in Wartime Japan, Oxford University Press, 1981)."

Japan did not have a Fuher (Fuehrer) nor concentaration camps nor Gestapo. Commnunists were arrested and jailed but released if and when they recanted their faith. What might be classfied today as socialists were nor arrested.

"But unlike the Italian and German cases, there was no dictator and the system was not the product of a well-defined, popular movement, but more a vague change of mood, a shift in the balance of power between the elite groups in Japanese society, and a consequent shift in national politics.... (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese, Charles E. Tuttle, 1978)."

"General Tojo, the premier, has great power, but his authority in the Japanese government does not equal Roosevelt's in the United States nor Churchill's in England, to say nothing of Hitler's and Mussolini's ditatorships (Hillis Lory, quoted by Ben-Amy Shillony, ibid.)"

What about Hirohito? He was politically impotent like his father and grandfather. I would like you to read, if interested, Yoshimichi Moriyama's comments to Project-Syndicate. org/Noriel Roubini/Global Ground Zero in Asia.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nouriel-roubini-says-that-if-the-global-order-blows-up-the-detonation-will-occur-in-asia.

Hitler did not want to avoid war with Stalin. That was exactly what he and the Nazis wanted. They wanted to invade Eastern Europe and Russia and build Lebensraum, enslaving and exploitig the Slave people.

Japan wanted to avoid war with the United States. Contrary to the popular image of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, it wanted to extricate itself from the quagmire of continetal war with China, though with some imperial interests assured. I would also like you to read Moriyam's comments to the Diplomat com./Paula Harrell/History Lessons for China and Japan. Moriayma is shown by two Chinese characters, not in the Roman alphabet.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/history-lessons-for-china-and-japan.

I would also like you to take interest in some more tidbits for this and read Yoshimichi Moriayma's four comments to YaleGlobal Online/Alistair Burnett/War Drums in Asia: Back to European Future?

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/war-drums-asia-back-european-future.

The summer next year will commemorate the 70th year of the end of the World War II. It is time to set us free from the distorted perception of the past. If you cannot set yourselves free, I would like you to liberate at least the Japanese