War & Peace Quote by Kenzaburo Oe

Oe’s sentence reads like a calm report, but it’s really an indictment of a familiar political sleight of hand: outsourcing responsibility. The target isn’t only the faction that wants to scrap Japan’s pacifist Article 9, but the convenient alibi that makes the project palatable. “Pressures from abroad” does double work here. It names a genuine geopolitical reality - the postwar security order, the U.S.-Japan alliance, regional threats - while also exposing how “external necessity” becomes an all-purpose solvent for domestic democratic debate.

The phrasing “have all along been attempts” stresses continuity, not crisis. Oe is warning that revisionism isn’t a sudden response to new danger; it’s a longstanding ambition waiting for the right headline. The subtext is procedural: watch what happens “every opportunity” a foreign provocation appears. The opportunism is the point. If you can frame constitutional change as reluctant compliance with outside demand, you can dodge the moral reckoning that Article 9 forces on Japan: what kind of nation it chose to be after catastrophe, and what kinds of power it refuses to normalize.

As a writer formed in the shadow of Hiroshima and Japan’s postwar settlement, Oe speaks from a tradition that treats pacifism not as naivete but as a hard-won civic discipline. His line implies that sovereignty is being hollowed out in the name of sovereignty: rewriting the Constitution while pretending the hand was forced. The quiet bite is that “pressures” aren’t just coming from abroad; they’re being actively recruited at home.