"Is Japan allowed to have nuclear weapons?"

The question -- once taboo in Japan -- has been posed by a Japanese website for about a year while US conservatives recently fueled the debate by saying Japan can go nuclear to counter North Korea's nuclear programme which surfaced last October.

Surprisingly, the suggestion has won support from 53 percent of nearly 8,000 respondents on the "VOTE.co.jp" site, which solicits votes on a wide range of issues from global politics to show business.

Despite the site's arguably limited audience, the question itself may signal a shift in public sentiment. Until recently the subject was off-limits in the only nation to be attacked by nuclear weapons.

The poll was initiated in June last year after Japanese leaders challenged the nation's so-called "allergy" to nuclear weapons and backed the US-led operations in Afghanistan ahead of the Iraq war.

In a university address, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said it was "not necessarily unconstitutional" for Japan to use small, so-called tactical nuclear weapons.

Then his boss, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, said Japan's 35-year-old policy banning the production, possession and presence of nuclear weapons on its territory could be "reviewed" but not during his term.

Such remarks would have cost them their jobs only years earlier and sparked fears of renewed militarism and territorial ambitions in neighbouring nations, where memories of Japan's wartime aggression persist.

In 1999, Shingo Nishimura was forced to resign as vice defence chief when he suggested that Japan's parliament needed to discuss having a nuclear arsenal.

Japan's post-war constitution renounces armed forces and bans the use of force in settling international disputes.

But in the hope of turning Japan into a "normal country," successive pro-US governments, dominated by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, have stretched the limits of constitutional interpretation with the progressive build-up of the military, the euphemistically termed Self Defence Forces.

Last month, they approved the dispatch of troops to help Iraq in non-combat operations.

The nuclear debate reached its peak when US Vice President Dick Cheney said in mid-March that the idea of a nuclear-armed North Korea would "probably set off an arms race in that part of the world."

"And others, perhaps Japan, for example, may be forced to consider whether or not they want to readdress the nuclear question," he said. "That's not in China's interest."

Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, a former Social Democrat lawmaker, has voiced his fears "that what the government aims for is a nuclear-armed country."

In Hiroshima's annual "peace declaration" at the A-bomb anniversary ceremony, Akiba will demand the government expand its non-nuclear policy to seek a ban on the production, possession and use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.

He will urge US President George W. Bush, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and leaders of other nuclear-armed states to visit Hiroshima to "confront the reality of nuclear war," according to a draft text of his speech.

Hiroshima was devastated by the first nuclear attack on humanity on August 6, 1945, which hastened Japan's surrender in World War II. An estimated 200,000 people were killed in the blast and its immediate aftermath.

Thousands of survivors have suffered serious illness resulting from radiation exposure.

Along with Nagasaki, which was flattened three days later by another US atomic bomb, Hiroshima has been calling for the eradication of nuclear weapons and an end to all testing, with the slogan "No more Hiroshimas".

But outspoken professor of international politics at Kyoto University, Terumasa Nakanishi has argued that the days when the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "sentimentally ruminated," are past.

"In order to prevent the advent of a third atomic-bombed site in Japan at the hands of Kim Jong-Il, we must take action in more concrete terms than rallies or pilgrimages to memorials," Nakanishi wrote in the August edition of the conservative popular monthly Shokun.

Citing an uncertain US commitment to save Japan from a nuclear attack at its own risk, Nakanishi proposed Japan looked at the possibility of nuclear weapons as a "key option" in the first half of this century.

A total of 45 Japanese opinion leaders wrote in the same edition, most of them saying it would be more advantageous for Japan to remain non-nuclear.

Japan has enough plutonium in spent fuel rods from its civil nuclear power programme to build nuclear weapons immediately, said Shigeharu Aoyama, a specialist in security and risk management, writing in the same edition of Shokun.

"In spite of this, if Japan actively rejects nuclear weapons and spreads the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the world by repelling US pressure... international trust in Japan will grow significantly," Aoyama added.

WAR.WIRE