Japan marks 66th constitution day amid protest against law revising

TOKYO, May 3 (Xinhua) -- Japan marked on Friday the 66th anniversary of the enforcement of its pacifist constitution amid large scale of protests against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's attempt to revise the country's supreme law.

About 3,500 people gathered in Hibiya Park in downtown Tokyo and took to the streets to demonstrate their oppositions against the government attempt to amend the war-renouncing Article 9 of Japan's constitution.

Leaders of the Japanese Communist Party and Japan's Social Democratic Party, Shii Kazuo and Mizuho Fukushima, also joined in the march, holding a banner which reads "to maintain the shining of the Article 9 and not allow any amendment that could worsen the constitution."

However, right-wingers also launch a march in a move to support the revision of the constitution.

Abe, a well-known conservative and hawkish politician, is eager to change the pacifist supreme law, which took effect in 1947 after Japan's defeat in the World War II, so as to make Japan's Self-Defense Forces a full national army.

According the Article 96 of the law, any initiative to revise the constitution must be backed by at least two-thirds of the members in both lower and upper house of the Diet, the Japanese parliament, before an "affirmative vote of a majority of all votes cast" in a referendum.

Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which re-elected as ruling party in last December's lower house election, aimed to revise the Article 96 firstly to ease the limit on revising the Article 9.

The party, which holds majority seats in the lower house, is trying to win upper house election that will be held in July in order to push its pledge of constitution revising, with supports from other parties' conservative lawmakers.

The New Komeito Party, an ally and a small ruling partner of the LDP, remains cautious over the law-revising attempt, while the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan also released a statement opposing any change to the constitution, according to reports.

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