The mistake by Yosuke Isozaki, a special adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was that he stated it outright. The former bureaucrat in his second term in the Upper House was forced earlier this week into retracting his controversial remark that "legal stability does not matter" as Japan weighs what is necessary to protect the country. The bigger problem is that the basic idea behind his gaffe — that security considerations take precedence over the stability of the legal system — appears to be shared by many other members of the Abe administration.

Legal stability means that provisions or interpretations of a law — which serve as the criteria to determine whether an act is legal or illegal — do not easily fluctuate but are kept stable. The stability of the interpretation of the Constitution, the nation's supreme law and the basis of its legal system, is the foundation of the rule of law.

In submitting the controversial security legislation to the Diet, Prime Minister Abe's Cabinet changed the government's long-standing interpretation of the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution to lift the self-imposed ban on Japan engaging in collective self-defense. A majority of constitutional scholars charge that such an act — in lieu of amending the Constitution itself — rocks the nation's legal stability.