On the 60th anniversary of imperial Japan's capitulation to the United States, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi acknowledged as "facts of history" the "tremendous damage and suffering" that flowed from Japanese "colonial rule and aggression." With that message to foreigners out of the way, he went on to tell the Japanese that "the peace and prosperity that we now enjoy are due to the precious sacrifices made" by Japan's war dead.

The segue from catastrophic war to current prosperity may startle outsiders. But, having called a snap election on August 1, Koizumi was looping back to the domestic concerns on which politicians assume Japanese voters will base their votes. A gauzy tie between wartime loss and economic gains may cushion any campaign debate about increasing tensions between Tokyo and other countries.

Rarely do voters in advanced democracies give priority to international issues—least of all in Japan. Yet the government that emerges from the September 11 election may dramatically alter Japan's profile in Asia and the world, particularly if it is determined to change one of the most enduring legacies of the 1945 surrender: Japan's constitutional renunciation of the use of military force.

Koizumi abruptly called new elections after the upper house of parliament rejected his bill to privatize the popular public-sector savings fund run by the Japanese postal service. He is boldly seeking to solidify control over his Liberal Democratic party, denying renomination to parliamentarians opposed to privatization. Conventional wisdom has it that voters will decide the election based on his take-charge personality and plans for economic restructuring.

Already Koizumi has reversed his government's negative poll ratings from July. But even in insular Japan, foreign affairs may penetrate voters' consciousness.

If so, George Bush will deserve considerable credit. Koizumi, after all, has been Bush's closest ally in East Asia. He ordered Japan's first-ever overseas troop deployment to a combat zone since Hirohito's surrender—sending "humanitarian" soldiers into the maelstrom of Iraq. Few in the Japanese public share Koizumi's zeal for Iraqi security; in fact, 55 percent of Japanese respondents in a July survey disapproved of the Iraq deployment.

Moreover, 52 percent said they do not trust the U.S. government, a number that has skyrocketed under Bush. By comparison, just 26 percent distrusted America after the first U.S. war with Iraq. Half the Japanese public now wants to evict the U.S. military from its bases in Japan.

The Japanese are not unique today in resisting Washington's dominance—the phenomenon has been worldwide during the Bush presidency. In recent years political leaders opposed to Bush policies have scored major gains, and sometimes come-from-behind victories, in most major democracies—what Japanese call "normal" countries. Even among the famously non-confrontational Japanese, voters may be tempted to vote against Bush.

New currents are also being felt among elites. Hard-nosed realists in the foreign ministry had favored sending troops to Iraq to seal the Bush administration's support for a permanent Japanese seat on the United Nations Security Council. They feel betrayed by Washington's alliance with China to derail Tokyo's UN plan.

Japanese diplomats have traditionally been embarrassed by, and worked to circumvent, their public's profound postwar pacifism. But they now find a more abrasively nationalist tide coursing through Japanese politics far harder to manage. Gratuitous issues like textbooks that "whitewash" imperial war policies, officials' visits to the Yasukuni shrine where war criminals are venerated with other war dead, and tendentious territorial claims to scattered rocks on the high seas all poison already pained relations with the Koreans and Chinese—with no compensating gains elsewhere.

In this context, the drive by Koizumi's conservatives to revise Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which bars reconstitution of Japan's military forces, arouses anxieties throughout Asia. Japan is not the only Axis power to renounce military force in its postwar constitution. Germany and Italy include similar provisions, but neither Germans nor Italians have sought to alter their constitutional bans (which do not, it should be noted, prohibit armed forces, as Japan's does), and both have paid reparations to their war victims.

There are some signs that Japan's once overwhelming public support for the "peace constitution," which frustrated conservative elites for decades, is softening. The long campaign by the right to unlearn the Japanese public's antimilitary lessons from the Second World War—like American counterparts' drive to exorcise a "Vietnam syndrome"—is apparently registering gains in both elite and youthful opinion.

Koizumi's Buddhist coalition partner, the Komeito party, still resists Article 9 revision. But if Koizumi can strengthen the grip of his Liberal Democrats, the issue is likely to move onto the action agenda—roiling Asia's political waters. The opposition Democratic Party, like its American namesake, is confused and schizophrenic on security policy, but if it scores an upset, its paralysis on the issue would sidestep a row in Asia.

So the September 11 election is not just another Japanese election reshuffling the same political cards and rearranging political faces, with little consequence for the world outside. There are some wild cards in this deck, and they could change East Asia's political game.

Jeffrey Laurenti is senior fellow in international affairs at The Century Foundation.