It’s all been building up to this: two anti-pacifism bills in Japan’s parliament that the ruling party is pushing to vote on before the end of this week. But the Japanese people are staunchly opposed to the bills.

Tokyo is weighing signing on with NATO’s SeaSparrow shipborne missile consortium, which among other things would be its first such consortium and would deepen Japanese defense ties with key allies.

Even a scholar picked by Japan’s ruling LDP party thinks the party’s collective self-defense bill is unconstitutional.

According to the Japanese Prime Minister, under the newly reinterpreted constitution Japan won’t be obligated to join America’s global conflicts. But in his remarks, he made a point of leaving room for Japan to choose to fight by America’s side.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has been fighting hard to change Japan’s constitutional restrictions on its ability to wage war. But it’s a big step from making something technically constitutional to making it the law,

With parliament set to pass laws that officialize a more activist Japanese regional security policy, and with a major arms deal with Australia finally coming down the pike, Abe’s push to remilitarize Japan is in the home stretch. It’s going to be a big few weeks.

Japan hosts its first arms show, ever. But the public has not yet lined up behind Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempts to overcome decades of institutionalized pacifism.

A top official of Japan’s ruling LDP government was in Washington, and he made it clear that under the Abe cabinet’s recent “reinterpretation” of Japan’s officially pacifist post-War constitution, Tokyo will not be pulling any punches.

Tokyo just commissioned the biggest warship it has added to its fleet since WWII, in only the latest sign that Japan’s rising militarism would curtail Chinese regional ambitions.

In the run-up to a parliamentary vote on reinterpreting the constitution, Japan is taking lots of little steps away from its official post-war pacifism.