My new commentary for the Bangkok Post’s Asia Focus section on Japan’s upper house election and Shinzo Abe’s dream of amending the constitution.

‘When the country is strong, and the risk of war small, when there is no threat of being attacked from without,” the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki once said, “then nationalism ought to diminish accordingly.”

A little over a hundred years after Soseki gave his lecture, Japan finds itself in an increasingly challenging geopolitical neighbourhood, with a nationalist prime minister ready to take the country in a new direction.

Click here for the full article.