Japan wrestles with its pacifism ADVERTISING Japan wrestles with its pacifism A vote in the Japanese Parliament last week brought Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a step closer to one of his most important national security goals — a law that
Japan wrestles with its pacifism
A vote in the Japanese Parliament last week brought Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a step closer to one of his most important national security goals — a law that would give the Japanese armed forces limited powers to engage in foreign combat for the first time since World War II. But the way Abe engineered the victory has caused great anxiety about whether he intends to honor Japan’s deep postwar commitment to pacifism.
That the world’s third-largest economy should seek a greater international role 70 years after the end of World War II should come as no surprise — especially in Asia, where China is becoming more assertive. The problem is less that goal than the way Abe is pursuing it.
At the core of the debate is Japan’s constitution, imposed by the U.S. Army in 1947. It has permitted the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, to engage only in self-defense. That meant that a large and technologically advanced military could not engage in “collective self-defense” — aiding friendly countries under attack — and was thus far more constrained than the armed forces of other nations.
Abe has long argued for modifying the constitution so that Japan could assert itself as a “normal” country freed from postwar constraints. Last year, he announced his intention to prepare Japan’s military for expanded missions like defending an American ship under attack, destroying a North Korean missile headed toward the United States or playing a larger role in United Nations peacekeeping operations. He also promised that Japan would be a fuller partner in countering China and its sweeping claims to most of the South China Sea.
The impediment to these ambitions was Article 9 of the constitution, which says the Japanese people “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.” Under normal circumstances, changing the article would mean revising the constitution, which would require two-thirds approval in both houses of Parliament, followed by a national referendum.
Abe circumvented that process by having his government declare a reinterpretation of the constitution and then following up with legislation in a Parliament where his Liberal Democratic Party-led coalition has a majority in the upper and lower houses. The lower house approved the package of 11 security-related bills last Thursday; the upper house is expected to do the same. Unlike a formal constitutional change, ordinary legislation only requires a majority vote and there is no referendum.
Abe’s tactic was not original. Past governments have also chosen to simply “reinterpret” the constitution. But in this case the proposed changes went to the very heart of Japan’s postwar charter and were far too consequential for the process to be short-circuited. The critics included a majority of Japan’s constitutional scholars; nearly 10,000 people, including scholars, artists and a Nobel laureate, signed a petition opposing the new legislation, and tens of thousands of people have participated in demonstrations. Polls show voters oppose the legislation by a 2-to-1 margin.
Abe is already held in suspicion by many people in Japan and in the region because of his appeals to Japan’s right-wing nationalists and because of doubts about whether he genuinely acknowledges and regrets Japan’s wartime aggression and the atrocities committed by its government and its armed forces. The concern now is that he will lead a country that has long embraced pacifism into war.
Democratic leaders are more successful when they can persuade voters to support major policy initiatives and when they follow procedures that ensure changes are broadly accepted. For many Japanese, Abe does not appear to have made his case or picked the right way to move forward.
— New York Times
How not to fix the FDA
A bill passed by the House and ostensibly designed to streamline the Food and Drug Administration is loaded with bad provisions and may not even be necessary. The Senate should either eliminate or rewrite the flawed provisions before passing its version of the legislation.
The bill would weaken the FDA’s already flimsy regulation of medical devices, posing a threat to future patients who have devices implanted that cannot easily be removed if found defective. It would allow a drug to be tested on humans based on only limited evidence that it is safe and effective.
It would expedite the use of new antibiotics by providing financial incentives to hospitals to use them — benefiting manufacturers but also driving up costs and encouraging overuse, potentially breeding resistant superbugs. It would extend exclusive rights for manufacturers to market high-priced, brand-name drugs if they gain a new approval to treat a rare condition. And it would open a wide loophole in rules requiring companies to report payments they make to doctors to get them to prescribe their drugs.
While the bill has some valuable provisions — like making experimental drugs available more quickly to patients who have illnesses that cannot be cured, and promoting the development of treatments based on an individual’s genetic data — those elements don’t justify the bill’s passage in its current form.
The FDA was once routinely vilified for sluggishness and timidity, but with the help of industry funding it has made enormous progress in speeding up its reviews and approvals. The agency testified in April that its drug review times are consistently faster than those of all other advanced regulatory agencies around the world, with the result that American patients receive new drugs sooner than people elsewhere. In 2014, the FDA approved the largest number of new drugs in almost 20 years and also reduced the review times for devices.
A big reason the bill won bipartisan support in the House is that it would increase funding for the National Institutes of Health by $8.75 billion over the next five years, ending a decade of mostly stagnant funding. And any improved Senate version should certainly include new money.
Special interest money also played a role, with many of the top supporters of the legislation having received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and the medical device industry last year, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The Senate will take up a similar bill later this year. When it does, it needs to cure its many flaws, while also providing sufficient funds to the FDA to meet its ever-increasing workload.
— New York Times
