In November of 2014, a man set himself on fire in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park as an apparent protest against recent changes made to Japan’s self-defense policies. He did not survive. This was similar to an incident near Shinjuku station in June, when a man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire before the eyes of the horrified passers-by which he had been addressing at length on the subject of Japan’s self-defense policies.

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, the explicit promise to “give up war” was written into the Japanese constitution, permanently enshrined as Article 9 of that document. Ever since, there has been a constant tension between that limitation and the de facto rebuilding of the Japanese Defense Forces into one of the largest militaries of Asia. There has also been a constant tension between the political forces who want to amend the constitution and those which want to preserve the official, stated policy of pacifist self-defense. For the past six decades, the Japanese public has generally been on the side of the latter.

There are times, such as the present, when the public is more emphatically on the side of those who would preserve the pacifist Article 9 both in letter and in spirit. And while two self-immolating individuals can certainly not be equated with the Japanese public as a whole, the acts of these two men can perhaps be seen as an exaggerated expression of this long-held public conviction on this issue. Their deed is grounded in a deep wellspring of collective pacifist sentiment, and in the remembrance and traditions of past protests.

These men felt they could not tolerate the latest accelerated shift in Japan’s policies towards what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken to describing as “collective self-defense”. Most crucially, this label is attached to new policies which include the possibility of preemptive measures: the ability to strike at a perceived threat to the nation before it has fully materialized. Equally controversial has been the government’s effort to expand the military budget. The political opposition hears in this the rumblings of past imperial adventures, whereas Abe points out the need to adapt to growing hostilities in a changing regional context. Thus Abe points defends the “pre-emptive strike” measure as a new interpretation of the Constitution.

Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of the public oppose these changes. The renewed activism that has recently sprung up around the constitutional issue is remarkable, when you consider that Japanese civil society has been disengaging from politics for several decades.