Different countries have different answers.
It is US that does not want Japan to be a normal country.
US limit all attacking force for Japan and only leave defense force to Japan..
This is simply not true.
Article 9 and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty | Asia for Educators | Columbia University
"
The American vision of an unarmed Japan living in peace under the supervision of a world government was short-lived, however, because the international scene changed rapidly in the late 1940s. Chiang Kai-shek, America's wartime ally in China, was defeated by the communists and fled to Taiwan in 1949. Another one of America's wartime allies, the Soviet Union, quickly came to be seen as the greatest postwar threat to democracy. And in 1950 the Korean War pitted communist forces in the Far East against a United Nations force made up largely of Americans. Thus, by 1950 when John Foster Dulles was appointed to begin negotiating a peace treaty with Japan to conclude the American occupation, he and most other American policy makers had come to see Japan as very important to the defense of American interests and democracy in the Far East.
In negotiating the peace treaty that would end the occupation and return political control to the Japanese government,
Dulles also sought to pressure the Japanese to rearm and to conduct a military alliance with the United States. Although most of the allied countries signed the treaty, which was presented at San Francisco in 1951, several Asian states did not, including the new People's Republic of China (whose representatives were not invited to the conference) and the Soviet Union.
Rearmament
Ironically, by the end of the occupation it was the Americans who were pressing for Japanese rearmament while the Japanese government resisted rearmament in the name of the American-inspired constitution. Dulles
encouraged Japan to rearm itself in order to become an effective military ally of the United States, but the Japanese were very reluctant, as many remained shocked by the devastation of the war. The Japanese finally agreed, however, to the minimum compromise that the Americans would accept, which was the creation of a "National Police Reserve," a paramilitary force of 75,000 to defend the Japanese islands."
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If Japan repeals Article 9 tomorrow the US isn't going to be complaining
All this stuff you have in your head about the US "keeping Japan down" militarily is
FALSE.
) level of the Game of Thrones, Nihon-koku. We will keep a close eye on all of your moves. 
