I hate to say it, but Japan has more rights to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council than either UK or France. In a just world, Japan would already be on it. You could say the same for Germany and India. Maybe they should consolidate UK and French seats into one, and add Germany and India as new members. The UN could negotiate Japan's status after that.
Originally I'm interested in seeing Japan's position as UNSC permanent member and how they will perform, but then I thought for a moment and felt Japan will eventually become a second US in terms of behaviours, attitudes, and that's not good for their health. Japan, even China, is only beginning to emerge on the stage as major pawnbroker in hard power games, and personally I'd say only USA and Russia are very good at this game. (US for its participation in many situations, including screwing them epically to FUBAR status(Iraq, Libya, etc), while Russia's played really hard policies and actually able to affect geopolitical regions). While China's power is growing tremendously, its actual political influences are still regional at best, and not "experienced", or matured yet, imo, to deal with greater varieties of human securities and the participations in terms of depthness/intensity are still inexperienced. Part of this had to do with China not only still learning and minimal exposures, but also its non-interventionist policies which put it in a more passive role. And obviously France is barely an existence. As for back to Japan, I will say the same for Japan as I would say for China, but technically Japan has a lot less invested interests and power scopes in pretty much anything, so Abe, honestly, is really just wasting everyone's precious time at the Assembly. He's doing this to try and project and fling Japan back into the role of a normalized, strong nation, but if he looks himself in the mirror and reflect deeply(which is a wishful thinking), he's potentially setting up Japan for a dangerous path. In the contemporary Japan where a party like the LDP, which has a militarist past and ongoing militarist/right-wingist politicians atmosphere, has a major footprint in the Diet, LDP leaders will often succeed as the head of government. And going along with them will be harder-lined foreign policies and attitudes towards security conflicts agendas that pertains to only Japanese interests, which can come at the expense of the best interests of the primary conflict actors. This is essentially the Washington or all the P5's attitudes towards security agendas, and therefore adding Japan into the game is technically complicating things further. tl;dr, basically Japan is digging a hole for itself, UNSC/the world gets no benefits, and he's wasting everyone's time.
People often pondered the notion of changing the rules of the game of the UNSC or adding more Permanent seats, but I recalled one UN official saying, and which I agreed too, is that it's not only gonna complicate things further, but actually will stop UNSC completely to a halt. Adding more seats means you have to change the game first, and changing the game means the system of the SC will change rapidly for the worse(or defeats the SC's functionality) unless it's test-certified.
I also don't think the Japanese public really cares too much about what's happening on the other side of the world too much.
