Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has waited for the right time to show his hand. And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, by test-firing missiles and threatening to conduct another nuclear test, has given Abe the ruse.

Abe has finally unveiled his timetable for giving "a newly reborn Japan" a new Constitution: 2020. His announcement came on Wednesday when the country observed the 70th anniversary of the Constitution that unequivocally renounces war as a sovereign right of Japan and the threat to use or the use of force as means of settling international disputes.

Addressing fellow conservative lawmakers, Abe said Article 9 needs to be amended in order to include a provision to give Japan's current quasi-army, the Self-Defense Forces, a constitutional status. And he claimed it was one of his generation's missions to make the SDF "constitutional".