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Secrecy Bill Could Distance Japan From Its Postwar Pacifism

A protester was removed by security officers after Japan’s lower house of Parliament passed a national secrets act on Tuesday.Credit...Toru Hanai/Reuters

TOKYO — Brushing past angry street protests and apocalyptic editorials in leading newspapers, Japan’s conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, appears set to achieve one of the first items on his legislative agenda to roll back his nation’s postwar pacifism: passing a national secrets law.

The secrecy bill, which sped through the lower house of Parliament on Tuesday and is expected to pass the upper house soon, is considered an initial step in Mr. Abe’s efforts to turn Japan into what some here call a more “normal” nation, with fewer restrictions on its ability to protect itself and able to assume a greater regional role.

The measure, along with the creation of an American-style National Security Council approved this week, would strengthen the prime minister’s hand in a crisis.

Mr. Abe has said that tighter controls of state secrets were needed to plug holes in Japan’s protection of information and, most important, to persuade the United States to share more of its sensitive military intelligence. With China’s rise and increasing assertiveness, Mr. Abe has been leading Japan to become a more full-fledged military ally of the United States.

But the secrecy bill has quickly become a lightning rod for opponents, many in the news media and at universities, who fear that it gives too much discretion to the nation’s powerful bureaucrats to decide what is a state secret and allows a famously opaque government to provide even less information to the public. Many have warned that the bill could lead to abuses of power by the government, and some critics have gone so far as to compare it to much more draconian prewar laws that placed severe restrictions on speech, and ultimately allowed the military to drag Japan into World War II.

“Japan doesn’t have the strong tradition of freedom of speech, as our recent history shows,” said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of media law at Sophia University in Tokyo. “Allowing bureaucrats to declare whatever they want to be state secrets would make us no different than dictatorships like North Korea and China.”

One of the biggest criticisms of the bill is that its definition of secrets is too vague and broad. The current wording gives the heads of government agencies the power to declare information off limits if it touches on such sensitive national security areas as diplomacy, defense and antiterrorism policy. Those found guilty of leaking these secrets could face up to 10 years in prison, far longer than under Japan’s current laws.

The secrecy bill was submitted in tandem with the bill to create a National Security Council that Parliament approved this week.

Political analysts say the twin measures are the first steps in a legislative agenda that could eventually see Mr. Abe try to fulfill his long-held goal of revising his nation’s antiwar Constitution to allow for a fully developed military instead of purely defensive forces — still a controversial idea in Japan.

“This legal framework is needed for the proper functioning of a new N.S.C. that can serve as a command center for national security strategy,” said an editorial last month in Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative newspaper that has long served as a mouthpiece for Mr. Abe’s governing Liberal Democratic Party.

Taking advantage of the party’s control of both houses of Parliament, Mr. Abe, who had promised to end the country’s long political paralysis, sped the secrecy bill through the lower house in less than three weeks, and then into the upper house.

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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that tighter controls of state secrets were needed to persuade the United States to share more of its sensitive military intelligence.Credit...Yoshikazu Tsuno/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The speed, however, has left opponents feeling steamrollered, feeding fears that the secrecy bill poses a threat to Japanese democracy and inspiring bitter complaints that Mr. Abe was breaking from Japan’s tradition of building political consensus for major changes.

“We saw the iron fist of the Abe cabinet under its velvet glove,” said Banri Kaieda, the leader of Japan’s largest opposition, the Democratic Party, after Tuesday’s secrecy bill vote.

Some of the most vocal concerns were raised by residents of the region around the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of the evacuated town of Namie, noted at a hearing Monday — the only public hearing on the bill — that the government’s failure to release forecasts of the direction of radioactive releases during the accident two years ago allowed his townspeople to unknowingly flee into the plume. He warned that the bill would strengthen the government’s demonstrated tendency to keep vital information secret in a crisis.

“What is needed is more openness, not less,” Mr. Baba said.

Many of Japan’s top writers, journalists and academics have also made impassioned pleas against the bill, or at least urged that it include stronger checks on the bureaucracy’s powers to declare information out of bounds.

They and others say the bill fails to establish a mechanism for reviewing what is declared secret, noting that Japan also lacks freedom of information laws as robust as those in other democracies like the United States. They also warned that the bill could be used to prosecute not only officials who leak secrets, but also journalists or even university researchers who receive them. There is also no clear provision for sharing classified information with elected representatives.

In an editorial last month, The Asahi Shimbun, another large Japanese daily, stated that while it supported the need to protect state secrets, the current bill was “riddled with problems” that would keep voters in the dark.

“The bill gives the government a monopoly on information,” the editorial said, “and places extreme limits on the people’s right to know and inquire, and on the freedom of the press.”

In Parliament this week, Mr. Abe said the bill was needed to help Japan strengthen its management of classified information, something he said the United States has asked Japan to do after scandals here over leaked or mishandled security secrets.

Some experts say critics’ fears are misplaced. They point out that Mr. Abe has agreed to opposition party calls for the creation of an agency to monitor what is declared secret, though that language is not in the bill. They also say that the bill will be limited to sensitive information like military plans or intercepted cellphone messages from terrorists.

“I think this just brings Japan up to the levels of secrecy management of the United States,” said Yasuo Hasebe, a professor of information law at the University of Tokyo.

But imitating the United States is exactly the problem, many critics say, arguing that Japan should not pass such a bill when the United States and other nations are pushing for less secrecy from their own governments.

“The Snowden disclosures caused a major rethink in the United States,” said Mr. Tajima, the Sophia University professor, referring to the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

“And now here comes Japan, running in the wrong direction.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Secrecy Bill Could Distance Japan From Its Postwar Pacifism. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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