National elections were held in Japan this week, with the Liberal Democratic Party winning a two-thirds majority in the House of Councillors of the National Diet (the Japanese parliament). The LDP already held a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. If you read Josh Gelernter’s column in National Review, this win was the beginning of Japan “reverting” to fascism.

A two-thirds majority is required in each house to begin the process of amending Japan’s constitution. And amending the constitution is one of the central planks in the LDP’s platform. The constitution was imposed on Japan by the United States after the Second World War; it has never been amended. Why should it be amended now? As Bloomberg reports, the LDP has pointed out that “several of the current constitutional provisions are based on the Western European theory of natural human rights; such provisions therefore [need] to be changed.”

Gelernter points out several planks of the LDP’s platform, which are definitely nationalistic, and harken back to a more rosy view of Japan’s imperialist past.