Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso has created a storm of outrage well beyond Asia with a recent speech to a nationalist group of the Liberal Democratic Party, the governing party of the country. In a key part of the speech, Aso indicated that the LDP should learn a lesson from the Nazis on how to revise the Japanese Constitution: Do it "without anyone noticing it".

Aso, who is former Japanese prime minister and foreign minister, subsequently issued a statement saying that he meant in effect the opposite of what he said. Militants for constitutional amendment know which of the two messages is the true position of Aso, one which he surely shares with a good part of Japan's current government and with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Aso's exhortation to learn from the Nazis to change the Constitution when no one is looking is but one of a series of increasingly ominous outbursts of senior members of the current Japanese government.

In the run-up to the recent elections, we had the travesty of seeing the Japanese prime minister enthusiastically strapped into the cockpit of a jet fighter with the infamous number, 731, inscribed on the fuselage. His officials claimed it was a complete coincidence and oversight that the 731 fighter was chosen for the photo opportunity.

However, across Asia, this immediately brought to mind the unspeakable wartime human medical experiments performed by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army. In this embrace, there is nostalgia for a past of perceived greatness. But that was a time when the IJA rained death and destruction on the world, especially Asia, including the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the US and Darwin in Australia. Moreover, there is a cold determination to enact fundamental changes to the Japanese Constitution.

What Aso's allusions to stealthy constitutional change signals to his party militants is that, in today's domestic and international political context, a formal amendment of the Constitution is unlikely to happen. But the interpretation of the Constitution could be quietly stretched and twisted. Eventually, the effect of such manipulation would be the same as a formal amendment.

While selecting the example of how the Nazis were able to have the Weimar constitution in effect modified without a formal amendment was a particularly provocative comparison for many, but not necessarily for many within his own party. Although the LDP did well in the recent Upper House elections, it fell short of its ambition, both in terms of seats and popular votes. A two-thirds majority is required in the Diet to amend the Constitution. The LDP and its still more extreme nationalist fringe supporters simply do not have the numbers to amend the Constitution.

Similarly, in the Lower House elections last December, which brought Abe back to power in an apparent landslide, the actual number of votes cast for the LDP was less than it received in the previous Lower House elections, when the party had been badly defeated. In other words, popular support for the LDP across Japan is more shallow and narrow than is widely understood.

Domestic politics and constitutional processes aside, as Aso acknowledged in his speech, the international context is also "complicated". Complicated indeed, because people in China, up and down the Korean Peninsula and throughout East Asia, Australia and the US are watching closely.

This is not a case of acting while "no one is looking", as Aso's Nazi allusion suggested. Surely an attempt to formally amend the Japanese Constitution would trigger vast international opposition. But that will not keep the LDP leadership from proceeding to achieve their objectives of constitutional revision by other means.

There is talk, for example, that future Supreme Court vacancies should be filled by judges open to revisionist interpretations of the Constitution. Also watch out for personnel changes in areas of government which handle constitutional affairs.

What the revisionists want broadly today are the same three major changes they have sought since the early 1950s. First, there is the matter of official rearmament. That means in effect renunciation of the stated intent of Article 9 of the Constitution, a provision that commits Japan never again to develop an offensive military capability.

Second, there is a series of revisions of the individual and human rights clauses of the Constitution, including the role of women in Japan's political system.

Third is an "enhancement", as the revisionists call it, of the status of the emperor.

Of the three, the latter is discussed the least in public, but in smaller circles this objective remains central to the nationalist right, as it has been since the "Peace" Constitution was adopted in 1947. It is in this light that one can best understand the symbolism of Prime Minister Abe's cry of "Tennou heika banzai!" (Long live the emperor) earlier this year during the first national "Restoration of Sovereignty" day ceremonies, in the presence of the emperor.

While the literal translation might seem commonplace in reference to a present monarch, it is actually the historical equivalent of "Heil Hitler" for 1930s Japan and has never been uttered by a prime minister in an official capacity since the collapse of the war cabinet in 1945.

It is not clear whether the emperor was happy with the invocation of the nationalistic exhortation from the wartime period of the 1930s and 1940s, but the nationalist militants were giddy with excitement at the prime minister's full-throated cry.

Aso was right. There are important lessons for Japan and the rest of the world to take from the sad experience of Germany's Weimar Republic - or indeed from Japan's own equally sad history.

But they are just the opposite of the lessons he is urging the Japanese constitutional revisionists to learn.

The author is managing partner of Starfort Investments, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia and is a contributor to The Globalist, where this piece originally appeared.

The Globalist

(China Daily USA 08/26/2013 page12)