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.