GLOBAL ARTICLE NINE CONFERENCE TO ABOLISH WARMay 4-6, 2008, Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan

Franziska Seraphim, Boston CollegeTimothy S. George, University of Rhode Island

Why Not 9?Throughout the world, wars are still being waged and weapons are still being produced, with no end in sight.Drastic changes in the earth’s environment threaten the lives of millions, and poverty is rampant.Faced with such a world, global citizens have started to realize the importance of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.“To build peace without force”This is the concept of Article 9 that we want to ring throughout the world.

—Program for Plenary Session, Global Article Nine Conference to Abolish War, p. 2

Background to the Conference

The Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War (called more simply the 9 Jō Sekai Kaigi in Japanese, or Global Conference on Article 9) was held in the massive Makuhari Messe convention complex near Tokyo May 4-6, 2008. The conference was organized by two Japanese NGOs. Peace Boat, founded in 1983 by students protesting government censorship of history textbooks, is a Japan-based international organization that works to promote peace, human rights, and sustainable development. The Japan Lawyers International Solidarity Association (JALISA, Nihon Kokusai Hōritsuka Kyōkai), founded in 1957, is a leading organization of democratic lawyers in Japan and a member of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). The roots of the conference go back to the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), formed in 2003 after the start of the war on Iraq. In 2005, at the suggestion of its Northeast Asia Regional Meeting, GPPAC began a “Global Article 9 Campaign” using

newspaper advertisements and conferences to spread the idea that Article 9 is a useful model for efforts to achieve peace.

This background in the antiwar movement helps explain the nature and goals of the May 2008 conference. It was huge, international, and attended by members of a wide range of citizens’ groups and NGOs. It aimed not so much to protect Article 9 from revision as to globalize it as a vision and a tool for worldwide peace efforts. Moreover, it defined war and peace in more than just military terms to include human rights, development, and environmental issues. Because of this focus on a wide range of issues beyond Article 9 itself, the largest and most prominent citizens’ group, the Article 9 Association (9 Jō no Kai), which has over 7,000 local affiliated groups nationwide, did not formally participate, since its policy is not to take up any issues other than Article 9 itself. Nevertheless, many local Article 9 Association groups and members were among the thousands who attended.

General Impressions of the First Day

By the time Tokyo’s largest convention grounds at Makuhari Messe in Chiba opened its gates to kick off the three-day conference at 12:30 on May 4, enormous masses of people of all ages and nationalities—yet overwhelmingly older folks—had crowded the entire area, banners flying, advertisement boards held high, lines forming and snaking their way towards the entrance of the main convention hall. The atmosphere was festive and full of anticipation, as everyone began to realize just what a huge event this conference was becoming. Staff members were readily available for directions and information in various languages; once inside the main hall, tables with books, flyers, music CDs, T-shirts, and theme-wrapped tea bottles stretched almost everywhere. The front left section on the ground floor near the stage was reserved for foreign visitors, the press, and simultaneous translators, with multi-lingual receivers readily available to all who requested them. The event hall filled beyond its limit—12,000—while an estimated

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3,000 people, having failed to get in, formed their own rally in a nearby park, where the keynote speakers joined them after their scheduled appearances. The sheer scope of attendance seemed to signal to everyone: “Article 9 is important, and together we can make a difference.”

The Plenary Session on the first day was divided into two parts. Part I, “Article 9 as a hope for the world” featured two prominent keynote speakers, both foreign women, and two Japanese speakers, followed by first-rate orchestra and choir performances. Part II, “Creating a world without war,” highlighted four guest speakers from Ghana, the United States, South Korea, and Costa Rica respectively, set off by six visually and musically stunning performances by highly accomplished artists as well as new groups. Large-screen projections throughout the event, interspersed by videos, brought the action on stage close to all and powerfully reinforced its meanings. It was a festival indeed.

The event opened with a black-and-white video of a clock running while footage of war after war since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared in the background, each devastating picture crumbling into the next one. Slowing down in 2003, it finally came to a stop on May 4, 2008 against an image of the Iraq war. Indeed, this video anticipated correctly the overall aims of the conference: to invoke and build upon global citizen solidarity to oppose war as a means of conflict resolution, and to discuss ways to use the law to effect change. The conference thus explicitly aligned itself with the goals of two prominent international organizations, which had in fact provided the intellectual leadership of the event from its inception: the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in 1946 in Paris to make the violation of human rights and threats to international peace and security legal issues under international law; and the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), a world-wide civil society-led network established in 2003 to build a new international consensus on peace-building and the prevention of violent conflict. Accordingly, Japan’s Article 9 was omnipresent as vision, value, principle, or legal norm, with only occasional nods to its specific historical context.

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The organizational leadership of the event fell to the international NGO Peace Boat, whose co-director Yoshioka Tatsuya delivered the opening remarks emphasizing the large-scale misery created by wars all over the world and especially in Iraq today. Recalling Japan’s history of not only suffering in war but itself waging an aggressive war in Asia, he said, “We are gathered here today to preserve Article 9 and make it global property.” Indeed, three overarching themes framed this conference as a whole: (1) a critique of U.S. global policies, whether in Iraq, American military bases in Japan and elsewhere, or environmental policies; (2) the global applicability of Article 9 to different circumstances

around the world; and (3) the power of citizen activism to make, or at least influence, more humane and responsible global policy.

The first keynote speaker—1976 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire from Northern Ireland—clarified the immediate contemporary context for this endeavor: the Bush administration’s redefinition of war in terms of “preemptive war” and “regime change” ostensibly to prevent conflict, in gross defiance of international cooperation and international law. She called for an immediate end to the “immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq” and the establishment of a Marshall Plan to rebuild Iraq in ways that do not serve America’s imperial aims. Pointing to the 1998 Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland (also known as the Belfast Agreement) that ended thirty years of violence, she identified poverty, illiteracy, ethnic conflict, the marginalization of social groups, human rights violations, and climate change as the real sources of conflict.

The second keynote speaker—the president of the Hague Appeal for Peace Cora Weiss—criticized in particular U.S. pressure on Japan to revise its constitution in order to better serve American global strategies. “It is important to preserve the original intention behind Article 9 along the lines of the UN charter…We must not stretch the intentions of Article 9 to suit our national fantasies,” she insisted. Instead, Weiss suggested the applicability of Article 9 to the many different ramifications of war: as an environmental issue, a gender issue, an economic and developmental issue, a legal issue, and a youth issue. Following the keynote speakers, Tsuchiya Kōken, former chair of the Japan Federation of Bar Association, called explicit attention to the historical context in which Article 9 of the constitution was conceived: Japan’s aggressive war in Asia and the American occupation’s democratization efforts in its wake. Together, these speeches thereby outlined the most

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prominent themes that were to guide the symposia and discussions on the following day.

The four guest speakers appearing in the second half of the plenary session substantiated the ideals voiced by the earlier speakers from their respective vantage points. Emmanuel Bombande from Ghana found Article 9 to be an inspiration for his underdeveloped continent; Beate Sirota Gordon retold her engagement in including specific women’s rights as part of the gender equality clause in the constitution (Article 24); Lee Suk Tae from South Korea underscored the need to prevent a repetition of the wartime past in Asia by making Article 9 the property of all of Asia and the bedrock of reconciliation; Carlos Vargas Pizarro from Costa Rica explained the anti-war clause similar to Article 9 in Costa Rica’s constitution. Together, the speakers in this plenary session set the stage for the more substantive discussions of the following day.

Impressions from Day Two

The second day of the conference, with 6,500 people attending, seemed as crowded as the first, and even more lively. It offered a smorgasbord of symposia, panel discussions, workshops, music and other stage performances, and film showings, plus two rooms filled with booths set up by a wide variety of organizations. This day, unlike the first, offered attendees the chance to ask questions and join discussions with presenters.

Is Japan’s Constitution Japanese?

One issue discussed in several venues on both days one and two was the question of whether the constitution was imposed from outside, and therefore whether it is foreign and ought to be made more Japanese. The Potsdam Declaration promised a government “established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” Does the constitution represent the will of

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the people? Beate Sirota Gordon raised this issue in the first day’s plenary session, when she argued forcefully that the American authors of the constitution, herself included, consulted the constitutions of many different countries and incorporated suggestions from Japanese groups and individuals, so it is not an American constitution. The Japanese government at the time may not have been happy with the constitution, but she believes that the people welcomed it gladly. She said that it because it guarantees more rights, it is even better than the United States constitution, and that one country does not normally force on another country something better than it has itself. She then drew on Japanese history, noting that Japan has always imported good ideas and made them its own (Should Japan give up kanji or Buddhism because they are foreign?), and that progressive men and women in Japan had since the late 19th century been demanding the sort of rights the new constitution included.

In the symposium on “Realizing the Spirit of Article 9 in Asia, Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee pointed to the voters’ rejection in last summer’s Upper House elections of the policies of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, including his plans for constitutional revision, as evidence that they continue to support the constitution and Article 9. Takasato Suzuyo of the group Okinawa Women Act against Military Violence and author of Okinawa no onnatachi (Women of Okinawa, 1996) argued that the huge turnouts for anti-base demonstrations in Okinawa represent broad support for Article 9. The Japanese people, she believes, not only want to preserve Article 9 but also want to export it, and as co-founder of the International Women’s Network against Militarism she noted the developing ties between activists in Okinawa and in Guam and Hawai‘i.

In the same symposium Chen Jau-hwa, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Human Rights Program at Soochow University in Taiwan, situated the question in the larger context of debates over “Asian values.” For her, “Asian values” are not an excuse for rejecting “Western values” such as democracy and human rights. She sees Article 9 and peace movements in East Asia as deeply rooted in traditional Asian values. Traditional Chinese philosophy, according to Chen, places a high value on peace and human rights. She pointed to Mozi’s emphasis on universal love and his admonition against any activity that would harm others. The Confucian concepts of ren (benevolence; 仁) and yi (righteousness; 義) show that Confucius and

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Mencius considered it necessary to limit the emperor’s power to wage war in order to make it possible to focus on social welfare. Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama use Asian values to inspire nonviolent resistance and universal compassion. She concluded by saying that if every country in Asia were truly faithful to its traditional values, it would have an Article 9 in its constitution, and criticism of Article 9 as foreign and unrealistic would disappear.

Following Chen, Ban Zhongyi, Chinese author, film director, and founder of the Association to Support Former Chinese “Comfort Women,” offered the views of an activist from the PRC who has lived in Japan since 1987. A full apology by the Japanese government over the “comfort women” issue would be a good way to begin the process of exporting Article 9 to China, where the antiwar clause in Japan’s constitution is little known. But he cautioned that this would be a long and difficult process, given the fact that China has departed from the traditional values described by Chen as it has taken from its modern history the lesson that military strength is the source of national security and of political power.

In the symposium on “Linking Peace and the Environment,” Hoshikawa Jun, Executive Director of Greenpeace Japan, emphasized that Greenpeace is not simply a European and North American movement, and then added an interesting twist to Beate Sirota Gordon’s argument about the origins of the constitution by drawing on Iroquois history. After long efforts by the “Peacemakers,” the Iroquios League and the Great Law of Peace were established. This fundamental law, he argued, taught European colonists in America about the importance of a constitution and the fact that people could govern themselves without a king. He sees precedents for over half of the Japanese

constitution in the Iroquios Great Law of Peace, and therefore considers it to be in effect the “constitution” that is most similar to Japan’s. This means, he said, that Japanese may have the Iroquois, their “Mongoloid” cousins, to thank for their constitution rather than the American occupiers.

Article Nine, the Environment, and Economic Development

Several sessions on the second day delved further into the links between Article 9 and environmental and development issues that were noted in the opening day speeches by Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Cora Weiss, and Emmanuel Bombande. These were addressed most directly in the symposium mentioned above on “Linking Peace and the Environment.” There both Hoshikawa Jun of Greenpeace Japan and Alice Slater, founder of Abolition 2000 and New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, argued that the antiwar movement must also target our war on the environment. Both stressed the fact that demand for oil was behind the

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current Iraq war and makes future wars more likely, warned of the dangers of relying on nuclear power plants to reduce global warming, and described their organizations’ proposals for an energy revolution. Other sessions dealing with the environment included one on “Military Bases from an Environmental Perspective,” a workshop organized by the YWCA of Japan on teaching children about Article 9 and hopes for a nuclear-free world, and a session on the international campaign to ban depleted uranium weapons in which Belgian MP Dirk van der Maelen described how his country passed the world’s first law against such weapons.

In addition to broadening the definition of war to include humanity’s war on the environment, another main theme of the conference was war’s negative effects on human welfare and economic development. In the symposium on “Realizing the Spirit of Article 9 in Asia, Gus Miclat of the Philippines, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Initiatives for International Dialogue and regional official of the Asia Pacific Solidarity Coalition and of GPPAC, said that imperial Japan’s Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere brought not prosperity but suffering to the people of Japan and the rest of East Asia.

That prosperity finally came to Japan and began to spread elsewhere in East Asia only with Japan’s postwar economic growth, which was powered by the “secret engine” of Article 9. Takasato Suzuyo argued that the “peace constitution” made the movement for the return of Okinawa to Japan possible, but that instead of the prosperity they expected after Okinawa’s reversion in 1972, the Self Defense Forces were the first thing the people of Okinawa received from Japan. Only when governments make human security rather than national security their first priority, she said, will economic disparities began to be dispelled. Chen Jau-hwa, like many others at the conference, expressed the hope that the spread of the spirit of Article 9 would halt the arms race in East Asia and allow more spending on human security.

On of the most interesting speakers in the symposium on “Linking Peace and the Environment” was Auki Tituana, the Mayor of Cotakachi, Ecuador and an award-winning, long-time indigenous activist. His presentation fit well with the argument of the rest of the panel that the world needs to reject “Pax Americana” and “Pax Economica” for a “Pax Ecologica.” Now serving his third term as mayor, Tituana created an All Citizen’s Assembly in an attempt to establish true participatory democracy and to direct the people’s power against mining development and deforestation by multinational corporations such as Mitsubishi. Cotakachi

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succeeded in forcing the national government to revoke concessions granted in the area to several mining companies. Modeling some of his policies on those of his “friend Fidel Castro,” Tituana made medical care free and dramatically reduced infant mortality. UESCO declared Cotakachi a “City of Peace, and in response to a question from moderator Oiwa Keibo (who writes under the pen name Tsuji Shin’ichi), Tituana said that if he were elected president of Ecuador he would work to put an Article 9 in the constitution.

Article Nine in the Global Arena

While all symposia and panels on Day 2 explored global perspectives on Article 9 in one way or another, several themes emerged particularly strongly. The first, represented most powerfully in Symposium 1 “World Conflicts and Nonviolence,” used Article 9 to highlight nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution from an anti-war standpoint. This approach affirmed Article 9 most directly as vision and principle to be appropriated to conflict-ridden areas around the world. Another approach focused on Article 9 organizations in different countries and contexts, such as the panels “Article 9 Societies around the World” and “Japan’s Article 9 seen from abroad.” A mix of international panelists utilizing the latter approach dwelled less on the “spirit” or “vision” of a de-contextualized Article 9 but rather reported on the place of Article 9 in bilateral relations with Japan on the non-governmental level as well as the particularly resonances of such relations in their respective countries.

Such cross-national cooperation between citizen groups in Japan and—in this case—Canada, Ghana, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, and Costa Rica, respectively, took different forms. The Vancouver Save Article 9 Society strongly supported the Japanese delegation to the World Peace Forum several years ago, the most important benefit of which was educational: Canadian activists came to understand Article 9 against the background of World War II history in Asia from their Japanese counterparts, who made them realize the war-related roots of the divisions within the Asian community in Vancouver. In Ghana, by contrast, Article 9 remained an ephemeral vision while bilateral relations with Japan rested squarely on local benefits from Japanese ODA. The South Korean representative invoked his organization’s close collaboration with Japanese activists not only to realize Article 9 as a common basis for Northeast Asian security but first and foremost to entice more South Koreans to become peace activists in the first place.

The German and Swiss panelists invoked parallels and comparisons with Japan while de-emphasizing cross-cultural collaboration. A spokesman for Peace Museum Berlin reported on several Article 9 societies around Germany that share a common recognition of important parallels between the two countries’ past and present situations. He pointed to the EU constitution still to be voted on (not unlike the outstanding Japanese referendum on constitutional revision) and mentioned a recent high court decision declaring Germany’s troops in Afghanistan unconstitutional in an uncanny parallel to the Nagoya court ruling (see paragraph 3, page 11 for details). In both cases, the respective governments responded by (undemocratically) refusing to recognize the rule of law. A Swiss Press Club representative took

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a different tack. There is no Article 9 society in Switzerland, although Swiss newspapers have recently run ads about Article 9 prompted by a variety of NGOs working for peace in Geneva. Instead, he explored the Swiss counterpart to Japan’s Article 9: Swiss neutrality. Like Article 9, the commitment to neutrality came as a response to a devastating military defeat (back in the 16th century), and the transformation to a demilitarized society took a long time. And yet, Switzerland came to firmly embrace neutrality even in the midst of a highly militaristic Europe and instead build a new identity around the humanitarian tradition of peace and internationalism. Article 9 performs the same (potential) role for Japan.

The Japanese panelists reported on an Article 9 society in the United States, whose purpose is to get Japanese residents to take advantage of their right to vote while abroad (hopefully against constitutional revision), and on Article 9-activism among different women’s groups such as the Women’s Organization for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons. The emphasis here lay on the substantial threat to Article 9 from the United States and the Japanese government’s complicity in hosting US military bases and participating in

U.S.-led wars. In this situation, the government’s periodic contingency legislation concerning the use of SDF abroad were all steps towards undermining Article 9.

The prominent role of women as foremost victims in war and foremost peace activists transcending time and space came out loud and clear in many panels, particularly in Symposium 3 “Women’s Power of Building Peace.” Retired U.S. Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright testified on just how extensive and rampant sexual violence against women is not only in war areas and around military bases but more specifically within military organizations, specifically the U.S. military. She strongly called attention to the need for drastic preventative measures to curb the high rate of sexual assault of female military personnel in the U.S. army (30-50%) and its extension to civilian populations. Japanese panelists representing Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence and Violence Against Women in War (VAWW-Net Japan) seconded the need first of all of a global debate about violence against women to combat the silence surrounding this aspect of militarism and reported on their organizations’ participation in international conferences, from Vienna in 1993 to Beijing in 1995 and various Geneva conventions. Panelists from Kenya and South Korea talked about their particular women’s groups’ peace activities.

Although links between Article 9 and Article 24, the gender equality clause, were made primarily on the level of women’s peace activism, the importance of knowing the law and invoking the law emerged as particularly meaningful in connecting Article 9 with women’s rights. Cora Weiss, a keynote speaker at the plenary session, prefaced the symposium alerting the audience to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which states that women must be represented

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“at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict” (see <www.peacewomen.org>). Just like Article 9’s unequivocal renunciation of maintaining military forces for international conflict resolution, this UN law (ratified by all governments) is constantly being violated by those same governments. At the same time, these laws also function as powerful weapons for citizens to use against their governments’ illegal actions. The South Korean panelist Jung Gyunglan made this connection clearly when she reported on women’s activism to curb the new South Korean government’s dual strategy of threatening to dissolve the Ministry of Gender Equality and that of Unification. This combination also resonates in Japan, where some proposals for constitutional revisionism extended from Article 9 to Article 24, but this was not further explored in the symposium.

The last symposium on “Crisis and Future of Article 9” brought the discussion back to the immediate issues at stake in Japan itself. This overwhelmingly Japanese panel sought to contextualize the debate about Article 9 in terms of key postwar developments from the perspective of legal studies, the business world, psychology, and education. The goal was to complicate simple associations of Article 9 with “peace,” and to instead point to specific economic and political interests at stake. Shinagawa Masaji, former co-executive of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives (Keizai Dōyūkai), criticized “big business” for backing constitutional revision in order to reap profits from war procurements. In his view, the problem was the postwar ideology of state capitalism that made the state instead of the people the primary beneficiaries of economic gain. He drew a parallel between the functioning of the military and the economic realms: if the initiative is left to the state, the people suffer. The national referendum on constitutional revision will present the Japanese people with a historical opportunity to change this ideology and to send a strong signal that both the issue of peace AND of economic profit must lie in the hands of citizens rather than the state. The business world must ally itself with the people and force the government to address the inappropriate allocation of resources, i.e. to demand that military budgets be shifted to welfare.

Legal scholar Mizushima Asaho of Waseda University pointed to the long-term implications of recent conservative shifts in the political climate (as well as efforts to counter this) for Japan’s democracy more broadly. All panelists in fact agreed on the huge significance of the Nagoya High Court ruling of 17 April 2008, which declared the airlifting of multinational combat troops to Baghdad by the Air Self-Defense Force unconstitutional. According to Kyodo News, “presiding Judge Kunio Aoyama said, ‘The ASDF’s airlifting activities (to and from Iraq) run counter to (the war-renouncing) Article 9 of the Constitution’ and to the 2003 special law to allow the Self-Defense Forces to provide humanitarian support for Iraq’s reconstruction efforts. ‘The ASDF’s mission to airlift armed troops from multinational forces to Baghdad plays a part in the use of force by other countries’ and it can be considered that Japan is itself using force, which is banned by the Constitution’ ” (<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0XPQ/is_2008_April_21/ai_n25365040>).

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This High Court decision illustrated several points that emerged as central to the panel discussions: the engagement of citizens as epitomized by the lawsuit filed in Nagoya (and many other courts) by thousands of citizens and groups against the deployment of the SDF in Iraq; the mixed result of the ruling which found the government's action unconstitutional yet rejected the plaintiffs' demand for damages; and the government's immediate expressed intention to ignore the ruling. There is no question, however, that panelists overwhelmingly welcomed the court’s statement as a demonstration that the fight for Article 9 was worth it. Citizens were now called upon to protect Article 9 in ways different from before. Within the current political climate, a public discussion about the location of the normative power of the constitution had acquired new urgency. Strategies of civic activism must adjust to new realities; the legal tools are available, but they must be put to better and more consistent use. One panelist suggested that the Japanese government ought to be held politically, if not criminally, responsible for ignoring the Nagoya High Court ruling and forced from power. Another insisted on the contribution of peace education by inspiring citizens not through ideology but by stimulating people’s imagination for a more peaceful and lawful world.

The third public arena in which Article 9 has meaning today is foreign policy, in particular peaceful cooperation with other Asian countries. Rather than the first part of Article 9, it was the second part (commitment to not maintaining military forces) that needs further elaboration, and this must be done in conjunction with other Asian countries as it directly affects them. This part received the least attention but was addressed in other fora. This last symposium drew incredible crowds, however, and ended in lively discussions about the promise and practice of civic activism to turn around the new perceived conservatism not only in government but also society.

The Global Article Nine Conference: Did It Mean Anything?

On the third day of the conference the organizers issued an official declaration, as well as open letters to the G8 Summit being held in Hokkaido and July and to the Preparatory Committee meeting in Geneva in advance of the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. These are available at <www.article-9.org/en/resources/index.html#outcomes>.

To illustrate the participatory democracy created in Cotakachi, mayor Auki Tituana told a story from his home in Ecuador. Long ago, a huge forest fire caused all the animals but one to begin to flee the forest. A single hummingbird stayed behind and filled its mouth with water to attempt to put out the fire. When another animal asked what it could possibly hope to accomplish, the bird replied: “I may not be able to put out the fire by myself, but at least I am doing my part.”

The attendees at the Global Article Nine Conference, and the tens of thousands of members of Article 9 Association groups and other groups working to preserve Article 9, clearly see themselves as the Ecuadorean hummingbird. If the huge numbers of attendees and great success

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of the conference are any measure, they may well be justified in hoping that there are enough of them to put out the fires threatening Article 9. Only if and when a national referendum on constitutional revision is held, however, might we know if that is the case.

At the end of the day, the international organizations and speakers brought higher visibility to the task ahead in Japan but otherwise added little intellectual substance. Whether NGO gaiatsu (foreign pressure) will actually influence the debate about constitutional change in Japan remains to be seen. But the enormous number

and sheer range of Japanese citizens and groups, from lawyers and academics to a host of special-issue activists was truly impressive. The creativity, talent, and imagination displayed by hundreds of different grassroots campaigns coming together under the umbrella of a shared goal to preserve Article 9 brought its own intellectual weight to the cause, even if it is unclear how exactly this can be translated into political capital. At the very least, the Global Article Nine Conference succeeded in making visible the many links between global imperatives and local needs, between vision and practice, nurtured by myriads of human connections within and beyond Japan. This is important. But it is hardly unprecedented. As long as the government and influential lawmakers can choose to ignore the ideas and actions of high courts and global conferences (which is the reality in Japan as well as in other democracies), a more substantive change in the mechanisms of civil society is needed.____________________Franziska Seraphim of Boston College and Timothy S. George of the University of Rhode Island are historians of modern Japan and members of the Advisory Council of the Constitutional Revision Research Project They attended the Global Article 9 Conference with Reischauer Institute sponsorship, but the size of the conference made it impossible for them to attend every session. The full conference program is available at: <www.whynot9.jp/doc/Global_Article_9_Conference_Program_Final.pdf>

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