Abe’s secrets law undermines Japan’s democracy

On December 2014. the Doraconian law called "special secrets law" became effective in Japan. (for details, please refer to the below JT article.)
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Last year, 43 independent journlists filed a lawsuit against the State, claiming "the law deprives of their freedom to investigate and report, therefore it violates the constitution." They demanded to make void the law and asked for compensation. However, Tokyo district court dismissed the case. Then, 37 journalists appealed to Tokyo High Court. Yesterday, the case was again dismissed. In Japan, the case for "violation of constitution" shall be proved by concrete incident and "visible" victim(s). So far, no journalist was arrested under this law. The plaintiff is willing to appeal to the Supreme Court.
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Meanwhile, about 500 civil activists (led by lawers and former judges)filed lawsuit to Tokyo district court, and 200 in Fukushima, alleging "new security bill violates the constitution" yesterday.
.http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604270035.html
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Abe’s secrets law undermines Japan’s democracy
The Japan Times : 13 December 2014
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On Dec. 10, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new special secrets law took effect despite overwhelming public opposition. The new law gives bureaucrats enormous powers to withhold information produced in the course of their public duties that they deem a secret — entirely at their own discretion — and with no effective oversight mechanism to question or overturn such designations. The law also grants the government powers to imprison whistle-blowers, and prohibits disclosure of classified material even if its intention is to protect the public interest. This Draconian law also gives the government power to imprison journalists merely for soliciting information that is classified a secret.
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But if the designation is itself secret, how is a journalist to know if they are courting arrest? The constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press now confronts the discretionary powers of an unaccountable bureaucracy swathed in secrecy. In the course of doing their job, journalists could unwittingly solicit secret information and thereby be in violation of the new law and subject to imprisonment. The government maintains that the new law would never be applied in such a way, but the wording of the law remains vague enough that it could be.
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It is not terribly reassuring that journalists from media outlets that “properly serve the public interest” (presumably this excludes the Asahi Shimbun) are exempted from prosecution unless they “break the law or use especially unjust means.”Susumu Murakoshi, president of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, says the law should be abolished because it jeopardizes democracy and the people’s right to know.
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Meiji University legal scholar Lawrence Repeta agrees with Murakoshi.
“Establishing a balance between national security secrecy and the people’s right to know is a monumental task,” Repeta says, but suggests that such a balance is embodied in the Open Society’s “Tshwane Principles,” which provide for the protection of whistle-blowers who disclose information in the public interest.
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Abe understands that the public is against the secrecy legislation and tried to reassure us in an interview on TBS last month. “If there is a case where news reporting is suppressed, I will quit,” he said, adding that the law is “aimed at terrorists and spies. Citizens have nothing to do with it.” But the enforcement of law should not depend on good intentions and a politician’s promise. Laws outlast the former and the latter are repeatedly broken. The current legislation grants the government too much discretion to decide what is secret and hide inconvenient information from public scrutiny. This is a recipe for bad governance and abuse of power.
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Americans know this all too well. The Freedom of Information law in the United States did not become an effective tool for transparency until after President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in the 1970s. More recently, Americans learned about a massive government data collection program regarding their phone calls, web searches and emails involving the secret cooperation of private sector service providers. We know this because of a whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, who exposed the sweeping extent of this illegal surveillance.
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Japan’s new secrecy legislation provides for imprisonment of up to 10 years for leaking or seeking classified information deemed damaging to Japan’s national security. Nixon also invoked the nebulous concept of national security to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, but the Supreme Court rejected this sophistry and the public discovered what the government didn’t want them to know about the calamitous Vietnam War.
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Japan’s media-muzzling initiative has drawn criticism from domestic civil-society groups and Reporters Without Borders because the people’s right to know and freedom of the press — essential pillars of a democratic society — are at risk. “The right to know has now officially been superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know,” wrote Jake Adelstein in The Japan Times last year.
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There are good reasons why 80 percent of the public opposes this bill. Would the investigations into the causes of the Fukushima nuclear accident and the collusive relations between coopted regulators and the utilities that compromised reactor safety have been made public under the new law? The reason why the public and media pressured the government to enact the national Information Disclosure Law in 2001 was because similar prefectural and local ordinances had exposed extensive malfeasance by bureaucrats and their squandering of vast sums on lavish wining and dining in the 1990s.
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The grass-roots spread of such ordinances was prompted by the experience of survivors’ families who wanted to find out about the 1985 Japan Airlines crash that claimed 520 lives. They did so by using the U.S. Freedom of Information Law to access crash investigation reports that they couldn’t get from their own government. People supporting greater transparency are also mindful of the government’s role in knowingly allowing the distribution of HIV-tainted blood products in the 1980s to support Japanese pharmaceutical firms at the expense of hemophiliacs.
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Bureaucrats are not so keen about disclosure. Back in 2002, the Defense Agency was caught illegally investigating and maintaining dossiers on 142 people requesting information. The press was tipped off about this surreptitious surveillance, again showing the value of whistle-blowers and the need to protect, rather than persecute, journalists helping the public exercise oversight.
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Responding to public criticism, the Abe government has established a toothless oversight mechanism. The “public document inspector” will be based in the Cabinet Office, raising questions about how independent the review process will be. Moreover, ministers can turn down requests by the inspector to declassify material and need not submit documents for inspection at their own discretion. This perfunctory oversight mechanism will ensure a cocoon of impunity that threatens Japanese democracy.
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So who gets to handle the state’s precious secrets? The Cabinet Secretariat has warned government offices that such sensitive tasks should not be assigned to staff that have studied or worked abroad or attended foreign schools in Japan. Huh? So after years of spouting off about the benefits of internationalization and encouraging young Japanese to study abroad, the government is now penalizing those who have done so? Apparently the state is suspicious that such people might pose a greater security risk.
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Based on this logic, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must be a hotbed of spies and will be reduced to recruiting diplomats with no international experience whatsoever. With all these special secrets to protect, won’t Japan now need a special police unit to keep them safe and round up the globalized subversive elements lurking within the bureaucratic labyrinths?
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Satoko Norimatsu of the Peace Philosophy Centre worries about a climate of fear. “One of my blogger friends told me he was going to close his political blog because of the law coming into effect,” she says. “I told him that such self-censorship is exactly what the government wants.”Professor Repeta further warns that excessive secrecy leads to war.
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“The Japanese people should not forget that the same U.S. officials who pressured Japan to adopt a law that imposes heavy penalties on whistle-blowers and others who may seek to release secret information have also demanded that Japan revise Constitution Article 9,” he says. Abe’s re-election gives him more time to expand on the bitter legacy he is intent on bequeathing, one that many Japanese already rue.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/12/13/commentary/japan-commentary/abes-secrets-law-undermines-japans-democracy/#.Vx-sqLlwXIX

Japan’s Double Standard on Freedoms and Rule of Law

PM Shinzo Abe is maintaining a double standard on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

The Diplomat : 20 April 2016

A number of domestic and international developments have revealed a glaring disconnect between the Japanese government’s preaching and its practice on the issue of universal values.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proudly declared a values-based diplomacy for Japan in both his first (2006-07) and second administrations (2012-), emphasizing universal values such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law. In January 2013, not long after the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) regained power, he outlined the basic principles on which his government’s diplomacy would be based. One of these fundamental principles was the concept of “universal values.” A month later, he publicly repeated this commitment to “diplomacy that places emphasis on universal values.”

As a diplomatic tool, rhetoric such as “democracy, human rights and the rule of law” justifies the Abe government’s continuing alignment with Japan’s long-standing democratic allies and with other semi-democracies in Asia that share his strong reservations about China’s unpeaceful rise. It also pointedly excludes China by definition from any putative coalition of democratically aligned states.
On the other hand, several recent actions and policies of the Abe administration, particularly in the domestic domain, suggest that the prime minister’s declarations of a commitment to universal values are primarily a diplomatic device for international consumption. They do not represent a guide to the government’s stance at home on a number of key issues. Quite the contrary, the prime minister’s record clearly shows that his government is taking Japan in an authoritarian direction that is unprecedented in the postwar era. What is more, these steps seriously question Abe’s commitment to universal values.

Among a series of deleterious developments, the Abe administration’s record in dealing with the media demonstrates that it is falling well short of observing first principles of democratic accountability. Amongst the most egregious examples of media-muzzling are attempts to silence media critics, including creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation amongst journalists and other commentators who dare to question the government’s and ruling party’s policies, personnel and actions. In addition to the administration’s explicit actions to control the message, the 2013 State Secrets Law compounds the threat to freedom of news reporting by hanging over journalists’ heads like the sword of Damocles.

In the education sector, the Abe government has censored school textbooks, ensuring that the latest versions for students follow the government’s uniform line on history and territorial issues. The bottom of this slippery slope will land Japanese students in the same position as those in China, for whom only official accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre are available and who are taught that the Dalai Lama is a terrorist.

The Abe government has also heavied universities to rid themselves of humanities and social science departments, arguably, amongst other things, to discourage the training of students’ critical thinking skills, thus silencing another potential source of criticism of the government.

Yet another and possibly the most disturbing example is the proposed content of the LDP’s May 2012 draft revisions to the 1947 Constitution. In glaring contrast to the human rights Abe cites internationally as “universal,” the draft explicitly rejects this notion. It states that human rights derive from a country’s history, culture, and traditions, and are, therefore, qualified to the extent that they are influenced by these factors. Indeed, the maintenance of so-called “public order” is elevated over all individual rights, raising the question, “public order” as defined by whom? Presumably “the government of the day.” Instead of universal human rights, Japanese citizens will be given “duties and obligations” (unspecified) – no doubt, once again, to be defined by public authorities. At the same time, the prime minister has undermined the rule of law by claiming in the Diet to be the ultimate source of authority regarding interpretation of the Constitution, an act for which he will be judged by the electorate. In short, the meaning of the constitution is what the prime minister says it is, which would potentially remove the Japanese constitution’s safeguards against the rise of authoritarianism.

Last but not least is the Abe government’s flouting of the ruling of the highest court of the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Japan’s whale hunt in the Southern Ocean. In March 2014, ICJ ruled that Japan’s Antarctic whale hunts were unscientific and ordered it to stop hunting. Only three months after this ruling, in June 2014, Prime Minister Abe told the Japanese parliament that he wanted to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research. He thus personally endorsed the resumption of commercial whaling, which Japan had been conducting on spurious scientific grounds under the politicized term “research whaling” (chōsa hogei) used ubiquitously by Japanese authorities and in the media.

Japan has since resumed lethal research whaling under the much publicized heading of NEWREP-A and stated that it will not accept the jurisdiction of the ICJ on marine living resources, reflecting a clear double standard in its stance on the rule of law internationally. Nor does Japan recognize the Australian Antarctic Territory’s EEZ, or its Whale Sanctuary, or the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

The reality is that Japanese whaling is neither scientific nor commercial. It is a government-subsidized and sponsored industry conducted for the benefit of the Japanese whaling industry-cum-lobby and is certainly not for the benefit of Japanese consumers. This lobby is headed by the semi-governmental Institute of Cetacean Research, charged with propagandizing the virtues of whaling and an affiliated organ (gaikaku dantai) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF). Apart from providing plum positions for retired bureaucrats, many such groups play key roles in the ancillary apparatus of government intervention by undertaking regulatory and/or allocatory functions as well as participating directly in markets.

Whaling is defended against international attack on spurious cultural grounds, traditionally the last defense of the protectionists. The Japanese government tried the same defense of its rice industry at the Uruguay Round of the GATT, proselytizing the notion of rice as quintessentially a cultural good in Japan. Here it was considerably more successful, extracting a concession that allowed rice to be spared from tariffication under the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA).

http://thediplomat.com/2016/04/japans-double-standard-on-freedoms-and-rule-of-law/

Reform proposal calls for plea bargaining, limited recording of questioning, more telephone wiretapping and email surveillance

The Japan Times : 1 July 2014

 In April 2016, Criminal Justice Reform Bill (of the below contents) is under discussion at the Diet. 

The Justice Ministry has released a reform proposal for criminal investigations and trials seeking to introduce mandatory recording of questioning in limited cases, expansion of wiretapping and introduction of a plea bargain system.

The ministry plans to submit relevant bills to the Diet next year to push for substantial reforms after the Legislative Council recommends the proposed measures.

The proposal calls for audio or video recording of the entire interrogation process for suspects in cases subject to lay judge trials and investigations conducted exclusively by prosecutors.

The proposal comes after bar associations and other groups demanded that interrogation processes in all criminal cases be recorded to help prevent false charges.

It also seeks to extend law enforcement authorities’ use of telephone wiretapping and email surveillance to more than 10 additional crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder, arson, robbery, fraud and theft.

(Wiretapping and email surveillance are done at the presence of the staff(s) inside the communication company, so far. Under the proposed bill, the police can process these activities witho...ut the attendance of the communication company's staff(s) inside police office. )
 
The proposal also calls for plea bargaining to be introduced, under which prosecutors would agree to withdraw an indictment if a suspect provides depositions or evidence in connection with other cases related to financial and drug crimes.

 (Some people worry that this may increase the false charge.)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/07/01/national/crime-legal/reform-proposal-calls-for-recording-of-questioning-plea-bargaining/#.VxMHuP1FDZ7

 

U.N. rights expert sees threats to Japanese press independence

AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 19 April 2016



A U.N. rights expert warned Tuesday of "serious threats" to the independence of the press in Japan, including laws meant to protect coverage fairness and national security that he said could work as censorship. U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye, finishing a weeklong visit to Japan in which he interviewed journalists and government officials, said many Japanese journalists were feeling pressured to avoid sensitive topics, and that some told of being sidelined because of complaints from politicians.
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"The independence of the press is facing serious threats--a weak system of legal protection, persistent government exploitation of a media lacking in professional solidarity," Kaye told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo. He said he was taken aback by a widespread fear among journalists in Japan, many of whom requested anonymity to talk to him, fearing repercussions.
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The picture of Japanese journalism he painted was unflattering, including newspapers delaying or killing stories critical of the government. He also said a reporter was demoted and given a salary cut after writing an article on the nuclear plant in Fukushima, which went into meltdowns in 2011.
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Among Kaye's concerns is a law meant to ensure media-coverage fairness that allows the government to revoke broadcasting licenses over perceived violations. He also said the so-called "secrets act" law, meant to protect national security and public safety, is so broad it could obstruct people's right to know. Japan's government has repeatedly said freedom of the press is protected in the country, and sees nothing wrong with the law about the broadcasting license. That penalty has never been carried out on a broadcaster, but Kaye noted such measures can work as a threat to keep outspoken journalists in check. He said he decided to visit Japan after hearing about well-known broadcasters quitting, fueling speculation that they had been forced out.
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Kaye, whose report Tuesday was preliminary, is making a full report next year to the U.N. Human Rights Council. He said his job is not to take action but to identify problems, and urged reporters and activists in Japan to work together to change the climate for journalists. Japan needs to pass anti-discrimination laws, instead of focusing on hate speech, which could backfire and curb the freedom of expression, he said. It also needs to protect whistle-blowers, crucial for providing reporters with information about nuclear power, disaster response, national security and other topics of public interest, Kaye said.
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http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604190063.html

Atomic Cover-Up: The Hidden Story Behind the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Democracy Now : 9 August 2011

As radiation readings in Japan reach their highest levels since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdowns, we look at the beginning of the atomic age. Today is the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which killed some 75,000 people and left another 75,000 seriously wounded. It came just three days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 80,000 people and injuring some
70,000. By official Japanese estimates, nearly 300,000 people died from the bombings, including those who lost their lives in the ensuing months and years from related injuries and illnesses. Other researchers estimate a much higher death toll.

We play an account of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the pilots who flew the B-29 bomber that dropped that bomb, and feature an interview with the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller, who was the first reporter to enter Nagasaki. He later summarized his experience with military censors who ordered his story killed, saying, "They won." Our guest is Greg Mitchell, co-author of "Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial," with Robert Jay Lifton. His latest book is "Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and The Greatest Movie Never Made." [includes rush transcript]

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TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

 

AMY GOODMAN: "The worst nuclear disaster to strike Japan since a single bomb fell over Nagasaki in 1945 occurred in the spring of 2011 at the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the epic tsunami. Just last week, it was reported that radiation readings at the site had reached their highest points to date. The wide release of radiation, and fear of same, has forced the Japanese and others all over the world to reflect on what happened to the country in 1945, and the continuing (but usually submerged) threat of nuclear weapons and energy today."

Those are the words of Greg Mitchell, co-author of the book Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. Mitchell is our guest today. He has also written Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.

Yes, today is the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which killed some 75,000 people and left another 75,000 seriously wounded. It came just three days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 80,000 people, injuring some 70,000. By official Japanese estimates, nearly 300,000 people died from the bombings, including those who lost their lives in the ensuing months and years from related injuries and illnesses. Other researchers estimate a much higher death toll.

The atomic bombings of Japan remain the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war to date. At a ceremony over the weekend, the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, honored the dead from the World War II bombing, adding he deeply regrets having believed the so-called "security myth," which suggested Japan could be safely powered by the same atomic forces that instantly killed so many Japanese people over six decades ago.

Well, today, we’ll look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and their legacy amidst Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis. We turn first to Nagasaki through the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Weller. Weller was the first reporter to enter Nagasaki, defying a U.S. media ban in southern Japan. He worked for the Chicago Daily News, hired a rowboat to get himself to Nagasaki. He wrote a 25,000-word report on the horrors he encountered. When he submitted his story to the military censors, General Douglas MacArthur personally ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. George Weller later summarized his experience with the government censors, saying, "They won."

Well, six years ago, George Weller’s son Anthony discovered a copy of the suppressed dispatches among his late father’s papers. George Weller died in 2002. They’re now published as a book called First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War. This is an excerpt of an interview that Juan Gonzalez and I did with Anthony Weller, George Weller’s son, shortly after he first discovered his late father’s papers.

ANTHONY WELLER: Well, I think the thing that astonished him the most—I mean, there were many things that he found astonishing. Remember, he went in there four weeks, almost to the minute, after the bomb was dropped, which was on the 6th of September in mid-morning, is when he arrived. And he was struck, obviously, by several things—by the physical appearance of the city, which was still smoldering here and there, by the surgical precision of the bomb itself. Later, he was to learn that, in fact, a great deal of damage had been done not just by the bomb, but by the fires that erupted, because people were cooking their midday meal when the bomb hit, and a number of wooden residences just caught fire, and the fire spread. So, in a way, it was kind of like a Dresden.

And as he went around the ruins of the city and rapidly began visiting all the hospital facilities that still existed, I know he was struck immediately, first by the absence of any American medical personnel there—four weeks later, there were still no doctors or nurses—and then, by the great precision and care with which the Japanese doctors had already catalogued the effects of the bomb on individual organs of the body.

And over the next few days, he was as astonished as the Japanese doctors were, of course, by what he referred to in his reports as "Disease X." It was perhaps not so astonishing to see some of the scorches and burns that people had suffered, but to see people apparently unblemished at all by the bomb, who had seemingly survived intact, suddenly finding themselves feeling unwell and going to hospital, sitting there on their cots surrounded by doctors and relatives who could do nothing, and finding when he would go back the next day that they had just died, or that, let’s say, a woman who had come through unscathed making dinner for her husband and having the misfortune to make a very small cut in her finger while peeling a lemon, would just keep bleeding, and bleed to death, because the platelets in her bloodstream had been so reduced that the blood couldn’t clot anymore.

So there were case after case like this, and, in a way, I think my father found them more poignant than the obvious destruction or the obvious burn victims, because here was a whole team of Japanese doctors, very able, very aware from long before the war had started about the potentials of radiation, absolutely baffled. And he had a wonderful phrase he used. He said the effects of the bomb uncured because—excuse me, the effects of "Disease X," which is what they were calling it, uncured because it is untreated, and untreated because it is undiagnosed.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony Weller, the son of George Weller, whose story on the Nagasaki bombings was blocked by military censors. As we turn now to an account of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the pilots who flew the B-29 bomber that dropped that bomb. This is an excerpt of the documentary Hiroshima Countdown, produced by Andrew Phillips.

REPORTER: This is one of a series of interviews conducted by the Air Force historical division. Today, we are interviewing Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets, Jr.

PAUL TIBBETS, JR.: They were definitely military targets. There was no question about that. And they offered such a—well, you could almost say a classroom experiment, as far as being able to determine later the bomb damage. These were good virgin targets, and they were ideal for the purpose that we wanted to use them for.

The consideration of targets would be Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata, Kokura, and there’s one more that I don’t remember. The 20th Air Force had been told they would not attack those targets under any circumstances. In other words, the ground was laid.

NARRATOR: As well as these targets, Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, was strongly recommended by the man with overall control of the bomb project, General Leslie Groves. But Secretary of War Henry Stimson, approaching 80 years of age, would not have it. He had visited Kyoto with his wife in the '20s and had enjoyed the city's cultural riches. It was a city of great religious significance to the Japanese, and Stimson felt Kyoto’s destruction would damage America’s post-war stature.

UNIDENTIFIED: The selection of the targets in the month of May 1945 was actually done by the intelligence community in headquarters, U.S. Air Force. The requirements given to them was: You will select cities that have military targets in them. And they also selected the type of terrain that they wanted. They also were interested in the type of construction that they could expect to run into, because in reality not only was this a military mission, but it was also of extreme scientific importance, because they wanted to know what a weapon of this type could do against reinforced concrete, what it could do against steel, what it would do against anything that was in the building materials line. It had to be something that had not been attacked by the 20th Air Force up to that time, call it virgin targets, undamaged, unhurt by any other type of an explosive or munition.

CHARLES SWEENEY: I know the type of bomb we were working on…

NARRATOR: Charles Sweeney flew with Tibbets in an observer aircraft to witness the bombing of Hiroshima. Three days later he lead his crew first to Kokura, the primary target for the second bomb, and then to Nagasaki. Kokura was clouded in that day.

CHARLES SWEENEY: As he was talking, he picked up a handful of earth. He said, "Basically what we’re working on is a single bomb that will turn a whole city into this." And he just tossed a handful of sand into air.

AMY GOODMAN: The voices of the men who loaded and flew the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, from the documentary Hiroshima Countdown, produced by Andrew Phillips. We’ll link to the whole documentary at democracynow.org. When we come back from break, we’ll speak with a man who has followed this story for decades, the author of Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell. Stay with us.
[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Greg Mitchell. He writes the "Media Fix" blog for TheNation.com. He is the author of numerous books. His latest is Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made.
Welcome. You have been covering this for decades. The significance, Greg, of this day, August 9th, 66 years ago, and what it means today in a nuclear-ravaged Japan.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, of course, it’s particularly poignant, given the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the—similarly to after Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the fears of so many people that they’ve been tainted by released radiation. And so, the psychological effects of the nuclear disaster are severe. And the other—in fact, survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been campaigning this year against nuclear power, which is something they haven’t particularly done in the past, linking nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the fear of radiation, the chance of catastrophe, the chance of disaster. So it’s a special day for that.

And, of course, the other reason is because, as I’ve pointed out for many years, the U.S. is the only country that has used the bomb twice in war, as you mentioned. And, you know, it may surprise many people to know we still have a first-use policy in the United States. And the lesson that has been handed down to us for decades now is that, yes, never again, we should never use nuclear weapons again; however, we continue—most Americans, certainly American leaders, American policymakers, American media—all defend the use of the bomb, or the double use of the bomb, back in 1945. So the message is, these weapons are too dangerous to use, but we used them before, we continue to defend it, we continue to have a first-strike policy. So, to me, that’s a very dangerous lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the color videotape of the atomic bombing that has rarely been shown.

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, it’s been around, well, since after, right after, the bombing

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that’s basically what my new book is about. It’s about the suppression of this footage, both the American footage, which is in color and was shot by the U.S. military, and the Japanese footage, which was shot by the Japanese newsreel team and is in black and white. In fact, in your first part of this program, almost all the images that people saw on the screen was black-and-white footage. Even to this day, not many people have seen much of the color footage, and that’s because the U.S. suppressed that color footage, shot by our own military, for decades. And it really wasn’t until the 1980s that any of it came out. Snippets have been used in film, you know, so we see a little bit more of it now. But in this key moment in our nuclear history, as nuclear power was becoming entrenched, as a nuclear arms race continued for decades, Americans were not exposed to the full truth of the bomb.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, the scientists at Los Alamos who made the bomb, most of them thinking that it would be used, if need be, on Germany

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —actually were privately shown this video, weren’t they?

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah. And so, the video was taken by the Pentagon, and parts of it were made into training films to show—you know, show our policymakers and our military what the bomb could do. What my book focuses on is two U.S. military officers who shot the footage, and then, for decades after, tried to get it released, tried to get it shown on TV, tried to get it made into a movie—

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us their names.

GREG MITCHELL: —to be shown in theaters. Daniel McGovern and Herbert Sussan. And they tried for decades to get it released and shown to a wider public, and it really didn’t happen until, you know, just a few years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the YouTube video that you just didn’t think was particularly controversial. It was a kind of promo for your book—

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —illustrating your point.

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah. Well, it’s—if people search for it on YouTube under "Atomic Cover-Up," they’ll find it. It’s just a two-minute video. And it includes some of the suppressed footage. And I think that’s why, after I loaded it on YouTube, I got a notice from Google that they were not going to allow any ads for it, because it showed—because of the "promoted violence," as they said, which was of course 180 degrees from what it really did. It’s sort of against violence and against war. And, of course, the real irony was that it was an act of suppression about a book and a video that is about suppression. So, there were—a lot of people protested, and that sort of ended it after a few days.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, speaking of the stories that were told about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wanted to go to Wilfred Burchett, the first journalist to make it into Hiroshima—

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —which was bombed three days before Nagasaki—it was bombed August 6, 1945—an Australian reporter who defied the U.S. military ban, who took a train for 30 hours. The whole area of southern Japan was off-limits. He took this train to Hiroshima. In this recording, an excerpt from the documentary of Andrew Phillips called Hiroshima Countdown, Burchett describes what he saw.

WILFRED BURCHETT: I went to a hospital, which had survived in the outskirts of the city. These people were all in various states of physical disintegration. They would all die, but they were giving them whatever comfort could be given until they died. And the doctor explained that he didn’t know why they were dying. The only symptoms they could isolate from a medical point of view was that of acute vitamin deficiency. So they started giving vitamin injections. Then he explains where they put the needle in, then the flesh started to rot. And then, gradually, the thing would develop this bleeding which they couldn’t stop, and then the hair falling out. And the hair falling out was more or less the last stage. And the number of the women who were lying there with sort of halos of their black hair which had already fallen out. I felt staggered, really staggered by what I’d seen. And just where I sat down, I found some lump of concrete, I remember, that had not been pulverized. I sat on that with my little Hermes typewriter, and my first words, I remember now, were, "I write this as a warning to the world."

AMY GOODMAN: "I write this as a warning to the world," Wilfred Burchett wrote, his reporting exposing the horrors of the bombings and particularly talking about—well, he didn’t have the words for radiation. He talked about an "atomic plague."

The New York Times correspondent told a very different story. The reporter, William Laurence, was not just working for the Times, though. He was also on the payroll of the U.S. War Department. That’s what the Pentagon was called at the time. Laurence wrote military press releases and statements for President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Stimson, all the while faithfully parroting the line of the U.S. government in the pages of the New York Times. He was awarded the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Nagasaki, as well as on the U.S. government’s development of the atomic bomb. His work was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.

In 2005, I joined my brother, the journalist David Goodman, to call on the Pulitzer board to strip Laurence and the New York Times of the Pulitzer for their atomic bomb reporting. Juan Gonzalez and I talked to David on Democracy Now! about the William Laurence’s deception.

DAVID GOODMAN: William Laurence was—had immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in the 1930s, at a time when actually the New York Times was laying off reporters, due to the Great Depression. They asked Laurence to become both the newspaper’s and the nation’s first dedicated science reporter. Laurence was—became fascinated with atomic power and atomic weapons and was an ardent supporter of atomic power in the articles that he wrote throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. This is probably what caught the attention of the War Department.

In the spring of 1945, a remarkable meeting took place, secretly, at the headquarters of the New York Times in Times Square in New York City. General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which was the name of the program that was developing atomic bombs for the U.S. military, came to Times Square to the New York Times and met secretly with Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, and William Laurence. At that meeting, he asked Laurence if he would become a paid publicist, essentially, for the Manhattan Project. So, while simultaneously working as a newspaper reporter for the New York Times, he would also be writing essentially propaganda for the War Department. Officially he was asked to put in layman’s terms the benefits of atomic weapons and the development of atomic power. Other New York Times reporters were unaware of this arrangement, this dual arrangement where he was being paid by both the government and the newspaper, and in fact were somewhat mystified when Laurence began taking long leaves of absence.

Well, the government’s investment in Laurence paid off in spades, because he was rewarded for his loyalty. He was also writing—ended up writing statements for Secretary of War Stimson and for President Truman himself. He was rewarded by being given a seat in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I’ll read to you a little excerpt of Laurence’s dispatch. In general, his writing—well, these days journalists would call it "purple prose," but it was often imbued with these messianic themes about the potential and power of atomic weapons.

Here’s what he had to say in describing the bombing of Nagasaki. This bombing is thought to have taken about 70,000 to 100,000 lives. Laurence recounted, quote, "Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned" —he’s speaking here of the atomic bomb— "into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural."

Now, Laurence went on to write a series of 10 articles about the development of the atomic bomb. This is—this and his reporting about the Nagasaki bombing won him the 1946 Pulitzer Prize in reporting. He seems to have been completely unashamed and unrepentant of what was clearly an egregious conflict of interest by any of the most basic canons of journalism ethics. Laurence later wrote in his memoirs about his experience as a paid publicist for the War Department. He wrote, quote, "Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution. No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter."

AMY GOODMAN: David, I think it’s instructive, the effects of this reporting. I mean, on the one hand, you had someone like Wilfred Burchett on the ground, talking about—he didn’t even have the words to describe. He talked about "bomb sickness." He talked about "atomic plague." And then you have Laurence’s front-page story, September 12th, 1945, "U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm that Blast and Not Radiation Took Toll." This, after William Laurence, while he didn’t go to Hiroshima, was taken by Leslie Groves, the general in charge of the Manhattan Project, that was responsible for the bomb, took Laurence and other reporters to New Mexico to counter what the War Department, what Groves was calling Japanese propaganda of the effects, the deadly effects of radiation.

DAVID GOODMAN: And, in fact, Laurence knew better, because having observed the Trinity test, the first explosion of the atomic bomb in the deserts of New Mexico, he knew that Geiger counters had spiked around the area of the bombing long after the actual bomb itself. In fact, an interesting footnote to this whole encounter is that when Laurence was brought by Groves in this effort, as Amy describes...

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to pull out of that clip of David Goodman describing William Laurence. William Laurence, Greg Mitchell, the original embedded reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports, was also on the payroll of the War Department, writing the Stimson press releases and statements.

GREG MITCHELL: Right, right. Well, it was—I mean, he’s a symbol, I guess, but really it was—we’ve had decades of the suppression. You know, my book talks about the film footage, which was extremely significant, but, of course, in the media and in the official statements by the government, there was basically a Hiroshima narrative. And it was important that it get established early, and then it be maintained, because of the arms race. We wanted to build the hydrogen bomb, which we did a few years later. And so, it’s been important to the development both of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy in the U.S. that this Hiroshima narrative be disseminated. And, you know, really, from the first words of the nuclear age, it was lie when Truman said that they bombed Hiroshima, which was merely a military base. And so, it’s been 66 years of that kind of misstatements and misleading arguments.

AMY GOODMAN: The words "nuclear power," "nuclear weapons" and "suppression of information" follow through right to today.

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is where we’re going to end, as the Japanese people deal with their government in the last few days, hearing that the radiation levels are highest than they’ve ever been since the nuclear meltdowns.

GREG MITCHELL: Right, right, yeah, that’s—it’s continuing today, certainly, in Japan. And one fears it would happen in the U.S., as well, if we had a nuclear crisis here. So, it seems like anything that nuclear weapons or the nuclear energy touches leads to suppression and leads to danger for the public.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Mitchell, his latest book is Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made. A contributor at TheNation.com, he was the editor of Nuclear Times in the 1980s, has written widely about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll link to his articles at democracynow.org.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/9/atomic_cover_up_the_hidden_story

 

Kyushu QUAKES

17 April 2016 : SNS by Nelson Surjon

Kyushu is experiencing extremely powerful quakes. Thursday was a M-6.5, followed by strong after shocks with some measuring up to M6. Then a M-6.4 tremor on Friday. Saturday, another quake M-7.3 (officially now raised to a M-7.4) rocked the area (felt all the way to Tokyo). Strong tremors are still expected.

More than 100 000 people displaced, 180 000 have no electricity and 80 000 without water. Over 2000 people injured and 41 people confirmed dead (as of 18h00 on Saturday 16th). Many are trapped under collapsed houses. People and children sleeping outside for the third straight night and food is becoming scarce.

The Castle of Kumamoto has had serious damage. Landslides, fires and floods are reported across. The volcano Mt Aso had a small eruption, the Aso bridge totally collapsed and a shinkansen derailed. The nearby Sendai Nuclear Power Plant is holding up (per the government's say) and scumbag Minister of Environment Tamayo Murakawa has stated there is no need to interrupt the newly restarted reactors.

With the railways and highways obviously not operational, these promised evacuation routes in case of a nuclear and other disasters are clearly not options. In truth, the Japanese government has no valid evacuation plan in place. The Japanese government are thugs. Murakawa is gambling with people's lives.

Scumbag Shinzo Abe won't come to Kumamoto.



 
 

RSF concerned about declining media freedom in Japan

Reporters without Border : 11 April 2016

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has evaluated the current state of media freedom and freedom of information in Japan ahead of this week’s visit by David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

RSF draws Kaye’s attention to the decline in media freedom in Japan since Shinzo Abe became prime minister again in December 2012. The Abe administration’s threats to media independence, the turnover in media personnel in recent months and the increase in self-censorship within leading media outlets are endangering the underpinnings of democracy in Japan.

The latest disturbing sign of government pressure on the media is public TV broadcaster NHK’s dismissal of current affairs presenter Hiroko Kuniya, which has caused widespread dismay among journalists. She hosted “Close Up Gendai,” one of the few NHK programmes to contain investigative reporting and analysis. Her interview of chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga in July 2014 has been cited as one of the reasons for her contract’s termination last month.

Other journalists have been the subjects of presumably forced departures. They include Shigetada Kishii, a Mainichi News journalist and anchor of the “News 23” programme on the TBS channel, who criticized the proposed security legislation at the end of last year, and Ichiro Furutachi, a well-known government critic who presented TV Asahi’s “Hodo Station” programme.

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government seems to be taking less and less account of media freedom and the public’s right to information,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“The special rapporteur must raise the issue of government meddling in the editorial policies of Japan’s public broadcasting service. We also urge him to examine the legislative framework governing the media, the law on state secrets and the constitution, whose revision could pose an additional threat to media freedom.”

The government has not hidden its hostility towards critical coverage. Addressing parliament on 8 February, communication minister Sanae Takaichi threatened to shut down broadcasters that continue to air “biased political reports.”

Questioned by journalists the next day, Takaichi reiterated her threat, citing article 4 of the TV broadcasting law, which prohibits distorting the facts, and article 76 of the law on radio broadcasting, which allows the communications minister to issue closure orders without reference to a judge.

Conservative businessman Katsuo Momii’s appointment as NHK’s president in 2014 was seen as a government attempt to control news coverage. Momii caused a controversy when he said NHK should not “deviate from the government’s position in its programming.” He also supported adoption of the law on the protection of state secrets.

In June 2015, members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party urged the government to punish critical media outlets by pressuring advertisers to withdraw business from them.
Finally, inclusion of the concept of “harming the public interest and public order” in a proposed constitutional amendment could provide a mechanism for curbing free speech and media freedom. Introduced with any further details, this notion could be exploited by officials to arbitrarily brand media reports and opinions as threats to the nation.

The special rapporteur was originally supposed to have visited Japan in December 2015 but the government asked him to postpone the visit. Many observers suggested that this was because the government wanted to avoid any discussion of the law on the “Protection of Specially Designated Secrets.”

This law provides for sentences of up to 10 years in prison for whistleblowers who leak “state secrets” and for journalists and bloggers who report information they obtained “illegally” or sought from whistleblowers.

Japan is ranked 61st out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-concerned-about-declining-media-freedom-japan

LDP keeping close watch on foreign media reports on Japan

AJW by Asahi Shimbun :  11 April 2016

Sensitive to media coverage of its policies, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is monitoring foreign reporting on Japan and rebuking some journalists in a section on its online site.
The move comes despite frequent criticism over remarks by ruling party politicians about keeping the media in line. LDP Upper House member Ichita Yamamoto, who serves as Internet strategy adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his capacity as LDP president, defended his actions as the section's emcee. "It is normal to respond in a civil manner to those individuals who say incorrect things about Japan, and it by no means represents pressure," Yamamoto told The Asahi Shimbun. "There are no journalists who will stop writing because they feel cowed."

However, others, such as Martin Fackler, the former Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, have a different view. "While debate is important, a stance that considers opinions different from one's own as wrong is not an appropriate way to conduct debate," he said.

Yamamoto's section on the LDP site responds through social networking services such as Twitter to foreign reporting on Japan. It began on Feb. 17. Yamamoto not only takes up responses sent in by foreign journalists, but he has also reported on what he has written through his personal SNS accounts to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of foreign journalists. He has, so far, written about 18 articles that have appeared in Western newspapers and magazines. He touched upon, for example, an Internet article published by The Wall Street Journal, dated Feb. 10, which was titled "How Japan's 'Abenomics' Reached an Impasse."

Yamamoto directed remarks to the writer saying he disagreed with the article because it was still too early to make an appraisal about the Abenomics package of economic measures. According to Yamamoto, about 30 foreign journalists who have a large number of followers on their SNS accounts were selected, and their articles written in English, German and French are being monitored. If any writer responds to the comments sent by Yamamoto, those remarks are taken up on Yamamoto's Internet program. Yamamoto said he also informs Abe about such remarks.

The LDP has also asked TV networks based in Tokyo to conduct fair reporting of elections. One LDP lawmaker said at a party study session that the mass media "had to be taught a lesson."
Communications minister Sanae Takaichi, a close ally of Abe, stirred up a hornet's nest recently when she threatened to shut down broadcasters over "biased" political programming.
Yasuhiko Tajima, professor of media law at Sophia University, is a critic of the pressure being applied on the media.

"Politicians and others in authority should hold the position of accepting why counter-arguments emerge. It is putting the cart before the horse for those in authority to keep an eye on the media that must keep an eye on those in authority." Meanwhile, Iwao Osaka, a lecturer on political communications at Komazawa University, referred to the Japanese system of "kisha" press clubs in which member reporters from media outlets cover certain beats attached to government agencies and political parties.

"Debate in the open is not necessarily a bad thing, and I do not think those in foreign media organizations that are not part of the kisha clubs in Japan will feel any sort of pressure," Osaka said.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201604110035.html

Japanese government and TPP

Photo 1:

This is the election campagin poster by LDP (the ruling party) at the last election in 2012. It says, "We are absolutely against TPP, we do not participate in TPP negotiation", "We do not lie", "We are stable". Various records, such as the book Abe published and the video of the public interview, evidenced that Abe told this pledge by himself. However, Abe administration betrayed and promoted TPP. At the recent diet discussion, the member of the opposition party questioned about this. Abe said, "I have never said we were against TPP, never. Do not tell as if I told this by myself."
.

 

Photo 2 and 3:

 

To discuss about TPP in the parliament, the member of the opposition party requested the official documents to the government. The photo of the documents given are below. All lines are blacked out except for title.

 



 .
The world should not assume Japan is a democratic country any more.

Abe Seen Facing $54 Billion Pension Fund Loss After Election

Bloomberg : 4 April 2016

Japan’s government will escape a piece of bad news until after a summer election.
The $1.3 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund will on July 29 announce what may be its worst annual loss since the global financial crisis -- about three weeks later than usual and after an upper house poll that must be held before July 25. SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. estimates the decline for the fiscal year ended March at as much as 6 trillion yen ($54 billion).

The world’s largest pension fund has been swept up in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s package of deflation-fighting policies known as Abenomics, with the premier backing a review of GPIF’s investment strategy that led to it putting half of its assets in equities. Abe has been criticized in parliament by opposition party lawmakers who say the public’s pension money is at risk of vanishing as stocks tumble.

The management of GPIF is a concern for older voters, who make up the core of the electorate and are more likely than younger people to head to ballot boxes. And the delay in the results timing fits with other parts of Abe’s election strategy, according to independent political commentator Harumi Arima.

"They’re doing everything positive before the election and keeping the bad things for afterward," Arima said, citing policies such as cash handouts for elderly people on low incomes and efforts to resolve a shortage of preschool childcare.

The election “has absolutely nothing to do with it,” GPIF spokesman Shinichirou Mori said by phone from Tokyo on Tuesday. The fund is reviewing the past 10 years of results, so needs longer to compile the report, he said.

Bonds, Stocks

In 2014, GPIF announced a shift from bonds into stocks as it sought higher returns for Japan’s rapidly-aging population and assets that would do better in an inflationary environment. That initially worked well, with the fund posting a 12 percent return in the year through March 2015.

Since then, asset managers have struggled amid a global downturn in equities. Japan’s Topix index is down 24 percent from an August peak. GPIF lost 511 billion yen in the nine months through December, its quarterly results show. SMBC Nikko estimates the fund slumped by 5 trillion yen in the three months through March, as the Topix fell 13 percent and the yen strengthened.

"Having the announcement so late can only be out of a desire to reveal the losses after even a delayed House of Councillors election," said Michael Cucek, an adjunct fellow at Temple University’s Japan campus. The extent of the damage it will cause to the administration is unclear, he said.

A previous scandal over missing pension contributions was one of the factors that forced Abe to step down in 2007, after only a year in office.

In media polls, most voters say they haven’t haven’t benefited from Abenomics. Even so, Abe’s support levels are buoyant as opposition parties remain weak, and he’s on course to become the longest-serving premier since the 1970s. Abe and his aides have been quick to try to smooth over any signs of dissatisfaction, and the government on Tuesday set out plans to bring forward budget spending to give the flagging economy a boost.

Election Dates

No date has yet been fixed for the upper house election, but domestic media say it is most likely to be held on July 10. Media reports indicate that Abe may even call a snap election in the more powerful lower house on the same day.

The fund’s announcements of the annual results have come no later than July 10 in every year since at least 2008.

The new head of the fund, Norihiro Takahashi, said Friday it was inevitable that the GPIF’s earnings would be affected in the short term by the economic situation and that sizable returns could be achieved in the long term.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-05/abe-seen-facing-54-billion-pension-fund-loss-after-japan-vote

Henoko Has a Few Words for the Pentagon – an Okinawan ex-Marine Speaks Up

The Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Focus : 1 April 2016

At the protest rally at Henoko on 21 March (2,500 people in front of Camp Schwab protesting the Pentagon and the Japanese government's plans to build a new Marine Base in Oura Bay) there were four or five Marines up on the hill across from the gate with cameras and walkie-talkies and armbands, observing and recording the event. Clearly they were not there out of personal curiosity, but doing a job. Perhaps it was hoped that their presence would strike a Big-Brother-is-Watching-You fear into the hearts of the protesters, but if so, it was not working.

It occurred to me that, on the contrary, they could be thought as a useful medium of communication, by which the message of the rally would be conveyed directly to base headquarters, and from there to Pacific Command headquarters and on to the Pentagon. After all just a few weeks before, the Commander of US Forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Harris, had testified before the US Senate Armed Services Committee that Henoko base construction was two years behind schedule, and that the protest movement was part of the reason, whereupon the very next day Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide said, No, it's right on schedule. As it would be crazy for Suga to lie to the Pentagon when the Pentagon has the facts, it must mean that Suga really doesn't know what's going on at Henoko. From this we can learn that the Pentagon has better information about Henoko than the Japanese Government does. And the source – one source anyway – of that information will be these guys up on the hill.

I decided I wanted to talk to them, and when the rally was over I borrowed the mike from Yamashiro Hiroji and said something like the following:

You guys up there should know that the people down here are not frightened or troubled by you taking videos of them or recording what they say. That's because they have nothing to hide. On the contrary, they very much want you accurately to pass what you saw here today on to headquarters. And what did you see? First of all, you saw real anger, right? Not ideology, not some ism, but the real anger of ordinary people.                           

Imagine, if you can, a foreign military base in your hometown. Somebody comes out of it and rapes the girl who lives next door to you. The Base Commander comes out and says, "Oh, terribly sorry." Then it happens again, and the Base Commander comes out and says, "Really, really sorry." Then again, and the CO says "Yes, absolutely regrettable." And it happens again and again and again – for seventy years. If you had ever experienced something like this, you would be in a better position to understand what these people were saying today.

And what you also saw is a movement that is not showing any signs of disillusion, of despair, or resignation or weakening, but rather that is gaining in numbers, in determination, and in savvy. And a movement that sees itself as starting to win after more than two decades of protest. Construction has been halted. The unstoppable has been stopped. And if you want to know what stopped it, it's right down here. You're looking at it. So what we ask of you is, please, by all means, pass this information accurately on to headquarters. We very much want them to know these things.

(And I can report that they did record all of this with their various gadgetry, and presumably we can trust them to have faithfully passed it on to their bosses.)

http://apjjf.org/2016/07/Lummis.html

Document found that led Hatoyama to drop Futenma relocation outside Okinawa

AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 23 February 2016

One of the manifesto of former prime minister, Hatoyama (from the Democratic Party, the current opposition party) was to relocate Futenma US military base outside of Okinawa.  As posted earlier, the bureaucrat from Ministry of Foreign Affair disturbed him by telling US not to compromise on this negotiation. Another disturbance by the bureaucrat was as below:
.............
Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama likely scuttled his plan in 2010 to relocate functions of a contentious U.S. base in Okinawa to Kagoshima Prefecture, based on a classified government document citing U.S. military regulations forbidding such a move. The internal Japanese government document, obtained recently by The Asahi Shimbun, cites a U.S. military “standard” that stipulates a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter unit should not be based more than 65 nautical miles, or 120 kilometers, from its training grounds.
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But U.S. Forces Japan denies the existence of such an operational standard, raising the possibility that the document was compiled only to pressure Hatoyama to scrap his plan to move functions of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Tokunoshima island. “I remember being briefed by the Foreign Ministry and other government officials (on the U.S. operational regulations),” Hatoyama told The Asahi Shimbun. “I was told that it was impossible to relocate the units to outside a radius of 65 nautical miles from their training grounds, and it was the biggest factor behind my decision to give up the Tokunoshima relocation plan."
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The document, dated April 19, 2010, is titled “Explanations from the U.S. side on the Futenma relocation issue." It is stamped “highly classified.”
It says that the “standard governing the acceptable distance between bases of rotorcraft units and practice grounds where the units conduct regular exercises is clearly stipulated in the U.S. military’s operational manuals.”At the time, Hatoyama, of the Democratic Party of Japan-led government, was considering Tokunoshima island as the site to relocate functions of Futenma, based in the densely populated city of Ginowan on Okinawa's main island.
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Tokunoshima island in southern Kagoshima Prefecture, however, is located about 104 nautical miles, or 192 km, from the northern and central areas of Okinawa’s main island where the U.S. Marine helicopter units conduct regular drills. Tokunoshima residents held mass demonstrations opposing Futenma's move to their island. Scrapping the Tokunoshima plan backed Hatoyama into a political corner, as he had promised to move the Futenma air station outside Okinawa Prefecture. He eventually was forced to accept the agreement reached in 2006 between Japan and the United States to relocate Futenma to the Henoko district in Nago, also in the prefecture.
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The ensuing furor contributed to Hatoyama stepping down as prime minister in June 2010. In response to inquiries from The Asahi Shimbun, U.S. Forces Japan said in a written response earlier this month that the Marines have no official standard or regulation that mandates the bases and training grounds of its helicopter units to be located within 65 nautical miles. The Foreign Ministry has said that it cannot confirm the existence of such a document.
,
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201602230041

EDITORIAL: Watchdogs of state secrets designations fail in first reports

AJW by Asahi Shimbun : 31 March 2016

The Board of Oversight and Review of Specially Designated Secrets of both Diet houses on March 30 submitted their first annual reports to the president of the Upper House and the speaker of the Lower House. The boards are tasked with checking the designation and declassification of state secrets by the government under the state secrets protection law, which came into force at the end of 2014.

Sadly, the documents indicate the watchdogs have done a poor job of monitoring the government’s moves to classify or declassify specific information. They can hardly claim to have carried out their responsibilities as the Diet organs consisting of lawmakers representing the people. The boards examined a total of 382 cases in which 10 government organizations, including the defense and foreign ministries, designated about 189,000 pieces of information as state secrets. To carry out their tasks, the panels referred to related documents, including a record book about the designation of specific pieces of information as state secrets, in addition to interviewing officials of the 10 organizations.

But only a few pieces of classified information have been disclosed as a result of the boards’ efforts. Most of the accounts about classification contained in the record book submitted by the government are too vague to help the boards judge whether the designation was appropriate or not. One typical description about classified information in the document is “information provided by a foreign country.”

The biggest problem is the flawed secrecy law itself, which doesn’t clarify the criteria for classification and could allow arbitrary and capricious withholding of information by the government.
The opposition parties demanded that the government be mandated to submit information about designated secrets to the Diet. But the ruling coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party rejected the demand, saying the government’s administrative power should be respected from the viewpoint of separation of powers.

Why, then, did the ruling camp agree to set up secrecy watchdogs within the Diet?
The checks and balances system based on separation of powers requires the legislature to monitor and check the actions of the administrative branch of the government.  The watchdogs are the only institutions that can monitor the implementation of the state secrets law from outside the government.
The Diet should be alarmed by the situation and take steps to enhance the capabilities of the monitoring bodies.

What is especially disappointing is the boards’ failure to make any judgment about the government’s decisions to classify specific information. Instead, the bodies only called for improvements in the way the law was implemented as their “opinions.” It is hard to think of any good reason why they didn’t admonish the government to mend its way.

Even so, the boards’ “opinions” contain some ideas worth serious consideration. For example, they proposed that the Cabinet Office’s inspector general for public records management, who is responsible for reporting on the appropriateness of classification to the prime minister, should also report to them. The government should give serious thought to this proposal. The new national security legislation took effect on March 29, giving the government more power and discretion to take policy actions concerning the deployment of the Self-Defense Forces and other issues.
If the secrecy watchdogs lack the teeth needed to properly monitor the way the secrecy law is implemented, the government could make a wide range of arbitrary decisions without knowledge of the people.

The Diet needs to recognize its responsibility to monitor the government’s actions in this respect as the representative of the public and make constant efforts to improve the implementation of the law and rectify its problems. Such efforts would put necessary pressure on the government. The boards must not become watchdogs in name only that merely rubber-stamp the government’s decisions.
--The Asahi Shimbun, March 31

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/editorial/AJ201603310027
 

Japan's opposition regroup to protect constitution

New Democratic Party wants to save Japan from one of 'deepest crises of democracy the nation has faced in 70 years'.
Al Jazeera / Shingetsu News : 27 March 2016

Tokyo, Japan - Since his return to power in December 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has sailed with remarkable smoothness through the usually choppy waters of Japanese political party politics.

He has already led the ruling party to three landslide victories in national elections, and if he succeeds again in the House of Councillors elections this July, his ruling coalition might gain two thirds majorities in both parliamentary houses and could push through just about any legislation they desire.

For Abe and Japanese conservatives like him, this summer will present an unparalleled opportunity to rewrite the nation's pacifist constitution and to reshape the education policies, business practices, and the political culture of the Japanese nation according to their own vision, often drawing their inspiration from those elements of pre-World War II Japan that conservatives wish to revive. 

For the defenders of the pacifist culture and moderate legacies of post-1945 Japan, however, the current juncture is not one of opportunity at all, but in fact one of the deepest crises of democracy that the nation has faced in seventy years.

It is in this context that Japan's No. 1 and No. 3 opposition parties - though divided in many of their policy preferences - came together today into a merged political party. The new political party will be called Minshinto in Japanese, which will be rendered into English as The Democratic Party (DP).

At the founding convention of the DP held in Tokyo, Secretary-General Yukio Edano painted a dire picture of the current situation. "The Abe administration is destroying constitutional government, democracy, and the livelihoods of the people. There is not much time remaining to save Japan," he declared.

Challenges

Public opinion polls suggest that the new opposition force still has a very long way to go. A recent Sankei Shimbun-FNN poll put Shinzo Abe's ruling party at a 36.7 percent support rate and the new DP at only a 12.8 percent rate.

Almost no analyst believes that the DP can achieve its overall goal this year of becoming a party that could decisively defeat Abe and form their own government, but the more realistic - and many would say necessary - objective is to at least prevent Abe from gaining supermajorities in both houses of Japan's parliament, which would make him virtually unstoppable. A majority of 2/3 by the ruling coalition, according to Japan's parliamentary system, would allow it to pass any desired legislation, and even at the committee level they can pass their policies with minimal disruption as they would control most of the assignments and debate time.

As part of their efforts to fulfil this blocking role, one of the few opposition lawmakers to draw blood from Abe in recent parliamentary debate, Shiori Yamao, has been catapulted into the position of policy chief of the DP.

Yamao, a 41-year-old second-term House of Representatives lawmaker, has become a rising star after embarrassing the prime minister in debate over the lack of daycare facilities for working mothers and Abe's absence of a policy to address that shortcoming.

More broadly, however, the new DP shares one of the same vulnerabilities as its predecessor, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) - a lack of a consensus among its lawmakers about most specific policy issues or even whether the party should be identified ideologically as basically conservative, moderate, or liberal.

Coordination and alliances

House of Representatives lawmaker Takatane Kiuchi responded to this concern, telling Al Jazeera that "the important thing is that we need to become the ruling party again. We can think about the policies then."

Policy coordination is likely to become even more difficult as the DP is expected to absorb several liberal micro-parties in the months ahead.

Another challenging issue for the DP is what posture to take toward the Japan Communist Party (JCP), which has recently become the second-largest opposition force and often polls a respectable 5 percent public support level nationally.

On the one hand, the DP cannot afford to fight a two-front battle against both Abe's ruling party and the Communists and still expect to have hope of making major headway. Election cooperation with the Communists, therefore, does seem a necessity.

On the other hand, Prime Minister Abe has already been denouncing the Democratic Party-Communist alliance, causing considerable annoyance to the many conservative lawmakers within the opposition.

For his part, Kiuchi declares, "I am allergic to communism and so are all of my supporters."
But he then adds that the practical policy of DP should be to proclaim disdain for Communists in public while working with them closely "under the table."

Michael Cucek, adjunct professor at Waseda University and renowned analyst of Japanese politics, on the other hand, told Al Jazeera he believes a better approach for the DP is to go to the public and to "explain what the 'constitutionalist alliance of parties' means and why cooperating with the Communists makes sense."

Indeed, as discussed during the convention, the basis of DP-JCP cooperation is their shared perspective that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is threatening the very foundations of constitutional government in Japan and that he must be stopped very soon. They also agree that the controversial security legislation passed last September is unconstitutional and must be abolished as soon as possible.

Members of the general public did not express any enthusiasm over the establishment of The Democratic Party in response to inquiries from Al Jazeera.

A 47-year-old man on the streets of Tokyo, walking near the venue where the new opposition party was being formed, said, "the DPJ was a very irresponsible party while they were in authority, so I don't want to see them return."

A 25-year-old man wasn't as opposed to the DPJ government of 2009-2012, but stated that he wasn't excited about politics generally and that he felt "nothing is going to change" with the establishment of the new political party.

From this weak new starting point the liberal and centrist opposition parties are entering what could be the decisive struggle over Japan's pacifist constitution.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/japan-opposition-regroup-protect-constitution-160327100815531.html