Now that political forces in favor of revising the Constitution have secured two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the Diet, the Abe administration is expected to embark on concrete steps toward initiating an amendment. Meanwhile, Emperor Akihito's televised message to the people indicating his wish to abdicate is about to put reform of the postwar Imperial system on the political agenda. More than seven decades after the end of World War II, Japan's polity is now at a major crossroads.

In his 1990 book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf makes a distinction between "normal politics," which mainly concerns distribution of resources, and "constitutional politics," where the ways of a nation's political system itself are contested. His model shows constitutional politics become active when democratization of a country rapidly progresses — before the transition to normal politics once the constitutional system is established.

In the case of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party effectively gave up its bid to amend the Constitution in the wake of the uproar over revising the Japan-U.S. security treaty in 1960, paving the way for successive LDP governments to flex their governance capabilities in an era of full-blown normal politics. However, the basso ostinato of the party's platform for creating a "self-drafted" constitution did not die away. Now Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is seeking to push constitutional politics to the front in an attempt to draw attention away from the economy. But due to the question raised by the Emperor's message, Abe's pursuit of constitutional politics may not proceed as he had intended.