TOKYO - About 14,000 people took to the streets on Sunday afternoon in Tokyo to express opposition to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's policies over rights to collective self-defense, nuclear reactors restart and relocation plan of US military bases within Okinawa.
The peaceful demonstration, which was organized by civil anti- nuclear power groups based in Tokyo Metropolitan areas, came ahead of regional gubernatorial elections in next month.
The protestors gathered together in the Hibiya Park, in which a man set himself on fire last year protesting against the collective defense right, and then march around the prime minister 's official residence and the Diet building, holding paperboard reading "No to Abe's administration."
In the park, a high school girl from Chiba Prefecture was quoted as saying that to exercise the right to collective Self- defense means Japan will engage in war.
"If we don't oppose the policy, it means that we connive with them to wage war," she said.
The rally came after a graduate ceremony held Sunday morning in a defense university in Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture. Abe said the ceremony that the government will resolutely push forward legislation related to the right to collective defense.
The hawkish leader slashed comments saying the collective defense will drag Japan into war by criticizing that "the absurd remarks are irresponsible and instigating anxiety."
The Abe's cabinet, through reinterpreting the country's pacifist Constitution, gave a green light last year to allow the country's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to exercise the right to collective self-defense and the government is accelerating relevant legislation so as to legally dispatch SDF troops overseas.
The Japanese supreme law bans the SDF to engage conflicts abroad and the overhaul of the defense policy is questioned widely in Japan as it goes contrary to the war-renouncing constitution.
Japan's ruling camp on Friday reached a formal agreement on the outline of security legislation that would greatly expand the scope of overseas operations by the SDF, paving the way for the government to draft a series of security bills to make one of the most drastic changes to Japan's postwar security stance.
As the Abe's administration walks a right-leaning and historical revisionism politics, the prime minister's attempt to loosen the tightrope on Japan's "purely defensive defense policy" also triggers concerns among its neighboring countries.
