Japan’s largest opposition Liberal Democratic Party put forward the slogan “Recover Japan” in announcing last week a series of policy pledges, with which it would campaign for the parliamentary election set for Dec. 16. LDP officials explained the motto meant restoring a strong Japan that could show determination to foreign countries and make its people feel proud of being born there.

The election pledges, announced by the party leader and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have not drawn favorable responses but criticism and concerns. Little credence has been given to the measures the LDP promised to take to revive Japan’s stagnant economy, if it regains power in the upcoming election of the Diet’s lower house.

But it would still do some good to the rest of the world, if the party’s envisioned bold monetary policies lead to lifting Japan out of a two-decade economic slump. What is worrisome is proclaimed moves to strengthen Japan’s military power, harden its stance in regional territorial disputes and gloss over its past wartime atrocities.

The conservative party, which ruled Japan for half a century nearly uninterrupted before it lost the 2009 election to the Democratic Party of Japan, renewed its call for a revision of Japan’s pacifist constitution. It vowed to review the self-imposed ban on exercising the right to collective self-defense, raising the possibility of Japanese troops returning fire if U.S. forces come under attack.

The LDP said it would consider stationing public servants on uninhabited islands at the center of a territorial row with China and hold a state-administered event annually to claim Japan’s sovereignty over a group of islets controlled by South Korea. In moves that would add fuel to anger from its neighboring countries, it would change historical education to justify Japan’s past history of aggression and deny the sexual slavery forced on nearly 200,000 Asian women, mostly from the Korean Peninsula, during World War II.

The LDP’s pledges would only distance Japan from becoming secure and making its people proud of their homeland. Ditching its pacifist stance, which has contributed to its postwar prosperity despite having been imposed on a defeated Japan by U.S. occupiers, would damage its international trust and further aggravate relations with its neighbors.

Japan’s rightward shift appears to reflect its frustration with a long economic downturn and the rise of China and South Korea on the global stage. The LDP also seems to have felt the urgency of consolidating support from Japan’s conservative blocs ahead of the election. Opinion polls suggest the LDP will win the largest number of lower house seats, putting Abe in line for a return to the premiership he served for a year in 2006-2007, but still in need of coalition partners to form a government. Firebrand former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, who heads a populist party seen to be courted for a post-election marriage, said last week Japan must possess nuclear weapons, if it is to be taken seriously.

Such nationalistic pledges might strike a chord with a selection of the public temporarily but would never serve the fundamental interests of Japan. If it continues to turn a blind eye to historical truths, Japan would only be further isolated in the international community. As some Japanese dailies noted, the issue of wartime sexual slavery has been seen not only by Asian countries that Japan had colonized or invaded but also by the U.S. and other Western nations as a grave violation of women’s rights.

What the conservative politicians and public in Japan should realize is that their country’s prolonged stalemate has not been caused by what it believes is its adherence to its pacifist stance but failure to catch up with changes in the global trend. Japan should drastically reform its political system and corporate management, which appear to have stopped functioning properly. Simply shifting to the right will not solve its myriad problems. With nearly half of LDP lawmakers including Abe and all the six latest party leaders being hereditary politicians, it cannot be expected that its return to power will inject fresh atmosphere into Japanese society and move it toward acknowledging the past wrongdoings that, in many cases, implicated their ancestors.

As a spokesman at Seoul’s Foreign Ministry indicated last week, Japan must make history rather than repeat it, if it wants to usher in a bright future for its people.