Courting Trump and fearing China, Japan rethinks 80 years of pacifism

Now 87, Yagi had been lucky to survive the atomic blast that obliterated her hometown when she was 6 years old. The 1945 bombing of Nagasaki, and Hiroshima before it, brought an end to Imperial Japan’s brutal march across Asia and turned generations of Japanese against the militarism that led their country to ruin. Yagi said she felt a sense of pride and safety in the idea, enshrined in Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution, that her nation should never resort to force to settle international disputes or possess a fully fledged military. “For us, being a pacifist country wasn’t just a…