Constitutional Amendment? Dream on

There are two important thresholds in the 242-seat House of Councillors (HoC), in principle, 122 for a simple majority and 160 for a 2/3rds supermajority. The simple majority would enable the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition to secure Diet approval for all its political appointments—it has a House of Representatives super majority so it can override HoC vetoes on any conventional legislation—and the supermajority would enable it to put a constitutional amendment proposal to a national referendum.

Is the supermajority achievable in the next triennial HoC election in July, when half of the seats will be up for grabs? The coalition has 57 members elected to six-year terms in 2007, so they need to win 103. A weekend Yomiuri poll says that 37% of the responders intend to vote for the LDP in the national proportional ballot. I’ll spare me the details, but the following chart for the proportion of votes on the national proportional lists and the total seats won (including in the prefectural multi-seat districts) by the LDP and Komeito shows that in 2001, 39% plus 15% against a divided opposition produced a bumper crop of…77 seats. That’s impressive, but a far cry from the 103 that the coalition needs for a supermajority.

year	LDP national	DPJ national	KMT national	LDP seats	DPJ seats	KMT seats
2001	38.57%	16.42%	14.96%	64	26	13
2004	30.03%	37.79%	15.41%	49	50	11
2007	28.08%	39.48%	13.18%	39	60	9
2010	24.07%	31.56%	13.07%	51	44	9

The LDP could try to rope in some opposition parties. Specifically, the Japan Restoration Party led by liberal bugaboo Shintaro Ishihara and his mutual mancrush Toru Hashimoto and the Your Party would be amenable to the kind of constitutional amendments that Prime Minister Abe wants. The JRP and Your Party have one and 10 HoC members respectively who won’t be up for election this year. 103 – 77 – 11 = 15 seats seems doable between the two, even if they fail to coordinate their efforts at the prefectural district level. Unfortunately for Abe, the amendments that the LDP will be anathema to the pacifist Komeito, who will be sure to take their nine seats from the 2010 election plus whatever it wins in July and vote against them and possibly leave the coalition altogether, stripping their Sokagakkai votes away from LDP candidates in single-member districts (House of Representatives) and prefectural districts (HoC) where Komeito does not run its own candidates. There’s some talk about amending the amendment rules, but that itself requires a constitutional amendment, so good luck getting Komeito to go along with that either when it knows what comes after.

Conclusion: A constitutional amendment is a pipe dream. Instead, any changes in Japan’s defense posture will come by way of change in constitutional interpretation, not the constitution itself. Only a Chinese miscalculation of epic proportions that causes a sea change in Japanese public opinion will alter that.