Japan's Military Complex.

The students met secretly to avoid the campus radicals. Outside the gates of Kobe University, they boarded two minibuses last month and rode to an underground parking garage guarded by members of Japan's de facto Army, the Self-Defense Force. Inside this makeshift classroom, SDF officers and two Kobe University lecturers held the school's first- ever seminar on a topic shunned since 1945--the national-security implications of Japan's pacifist Constitution, a document imposed on the country by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's American-led occupation government in 1947.

After NEWSWEEK first reported on the course's sensitive theme in October, leftist groups went on a rampage. They raided the dean's office, besieged the law school and, holding banners reading stop homicide and don't force our students into war, demanded the class be canceled. "The seminar's aim is to recruit our students to commit the same horrors as the Americans have," shouted one activist. "They want Japanese to hunt human beings!" Under pressure, the university refused to host the SDF. "We've taken this seminar off campus to prevent chaos," explained Air Force officer Shogo Nakamura during the ride to the parking garage. "It was for the students' safety."

That the course went ahead, even covertly, is a benchmark of sorts for Japan. After avoiding the issue for more than half a century, the country is starting to analyze, discuss--even question--its lofty "Peace Constitution," which asserts that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right." Last month a powerful Diet commission established to study possible revisions released an interim report filled with 700 pages of opinions, pro and con. In it, members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party expressed a strong desire to clarify the SDF's legal status. "The right of self-defense should be clearly written into the Constitution," said LDP lawmaker Hiroshi Mitsuzuka in his statement to the committee, adding that Japan must "put an end to the 'theological debate' surrounding Article 9," the Constitution's so-called peace clause.

Revisionists insist Japan isn't reverting to its past militarism. The goal, they argue, is to align their utopian Constitution with something resembling current reality. Japan's military is, in fact, Asia's richest, best equipped and most modern, even though Tokyo still insists that the SDF isn't truly an army since it's eternally barred from offensive combat. Advocates of change aren't, in the main, after more tanks or guns, but more honesty. "Japan," says Motohisa Furukawa, a lawmaker who supports revising the Constitution, "has spent too much time and energy trying to call a black crow white."

Japan's past victims are justifiably alarmed by any hint of renewed militarism. China's state-run Xinhua News Agency recently accused Tokyo of capitalizing on post-September 11 security fears to expand its overseas military missions. Yet criticism from neighbors won't likely quash Japan's budding security debate. The proponents of change are too powerful. Washington, Japan's guardian throughout the cold war, wants Tokyo to strengthen its military posture. It hopes the SDF will participate more fully in the global war against terrorism and support American forces in potential conflicts "surrounding Japan," a euphemism for Taiwan and North Korea. Public sentiment for revision is growing, too. When Japan deployed naval ships recently to assist U.S. forces in Afghanistan, 63 percent of Japanese surveyed expressed support for the mission. "The public now accepts that Japan has to do more [and] is a bit cynical about the hypocrisy of Article 9," says Ellis Kraus, an expert on Japanese politics at the University of California, San Diego.

In retrospect, Japan's Constitution fell behind the times shortly after its ink dried. Drafted by staffers in General MacArthur's occupation government, it aimed to render Japan forever defenseless against its enemies and immune to nationalist fevers at home. But after the Korean War broke out in 1950, Washington encouraged Tokyo to rearm. Japan formed the National Police Reserve, which later became the SDF. Rather than amend the Constitution, however, the government simply reinterpreted it, claiming that its new military force was not a violation because it lacked any potential to attack other countries.

That fiction lasted for decades until the gulf-war crisis in 1991 proved an unlikely catalyst for change. Tokyo, invoking ...