When Japan's US-drafted, pacifist Constitution came into effect two years after the country's defeat in World War II, a Japanese brass band marked the occasion by playing The Stars and Stripes Forever near the Imperial Palace.
That same day -- May 3, 1947 -- a former senior Japanese official committed suicide in shame over the document, which renounced war and placed sovereignty in the hands of citizens rather than an emperor worshipped as a living god.
Fifty-seven years later, as Japan's military heads for Iraq at the nudging of the US on its riskiest overseas mission since 1945, a consensus is emerging among politicians in favor of revising the constitution, not one word of which has been altered since enactment.
That itself is a sea change in a country where the security debate has long been constrained by the Constitution's famed Article 9, which renounces the right to wage war and, if taken literally, rules out the very notion of a standing army.
"For much of the postwar era, the mere mention of tinkering with the Constitution was enough to bring down a government," noted the liberal-leaning Asahi newspaper this week.
"Now, the only apparent disagreement between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan is what revisions to make and when," the newspaper said.
Conservatives who have chafed for decades at the Constitution hope that a public increasingly worried about regional military threats, notably from North Korea, will back a revision.
But thrashing out specific amendments will be contentious.
"It will take five years at a minimum," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who favors revising Article 9 to resolve the ambiguous status of the Self-Defense Forces, as Japan's military is known, said this week.
Yesterday, Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) adopted a party platform including a plan to draft a bill to revise the Constitution by 2005 and a pledge to enact as soon as possible a law spelling out procedures for a referendum.
Amendments must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of parliament and a majority of voters in a national referendum.
The LDP's Buddhist-backed coalition partner, the New Komeito, is wary of revising the pacifist clause and a voter survey last year showed that only 42 percent of respondents were in favor.
But in a sign of the changing times, Naoto Kan, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, called this week for a new Constitution written by the Japanese themselves.
Kan says that altering Article 9 requires winning the trust of Asian nations with bitter memories of World War II and the Japanese colonization that preceded it.
"If we revise the Constitution to allow the overseas dispatch of Self-Defense Forces, it will invite huge problems unless we create a relationship of trust with neighboring countries [and assure them] that Japan will not take actions like those in the 1930s," he said in an interview late last year.
The government has been stretching the limits of Article 9 for the past decade, most recently with the decision to dispatch ground troops to help rebuild Iraq.
An advance army team left yesterday for Iraq to act as scouts for a mission that could total some 1,000 personnel.
The debate, however, looks certain to go well beyond Article 9 to embrace issues of culture, rights and obligations.
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