Time for Abe to stop leading Japan astray

The upper house of Japan's parliament has not yet made a decision on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's controversial security bills on Wednesday. Once written into law, the controversial "war bills" could open a Pandora's box and push the island country away from its pacifist Constitution and toward a militaristic path.

Abe railroaded the bills through the lower house in July. And the approval from the upper house will give Abe the opportunity to fulfill the goal he set when he took office in December 2012, that is, to "lift the ban on collective self-defense, revise Japan-US defense cooperation guidelines and expand Japan's Self-Defense Forces' role overseas".

The security bills, if they become laws, will allow Japan's SDF to engage in conflicts overseas for the first time since World War II, as well as go into combat "under certain conditions" even if Japan itself is not attacked. This would be an obvious retrogression from the defensive defense policy which Japan has adhered to since World War II.