Not far from where I live is a kind of amusement park where you can play soldier. It has a lot of chain-link fences and gray structures that look like bombed-out buildings. On weekends, men, and sometimes women, dressed in camouflage and armed with replica air rifles, re-enact the kind of military operations they see in Hollywood movies. The facility has its own showers and locker rooms, as well as an area for post-combat barbecues. Large groups rent it out for full days.

Such recreational facilities are not exclusive to Japan, but it's interesting to ponder the appeal of war games to a citizenry raised on the sanctity of pacifism. Lately, there has been much discussion about whether or not Japan should rewrite its Constitution, which renounces war-making capabilities, and become a "normal country" with a full-fledged military that can do all the things other normal countries' militaries do, like go abroad and kill in the name of whatever cause it deems important.

The discussion has avoided hard specifics. It has even avoided essential vocabulary. Several weeks ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was forced to backpedal when he called Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) "our military," and later opposition lawmaker Mizuho Fukushima was asked by the ruling party to retract a comment she made in the Diet about the government's national security bills, because she called them "war legislation." How can you debate such proposals if you have to tiptoe around their meaning?