So basically, the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's governing party, the Liberal Democratic Party, is pulling all the stops to pass a secrecy bill that would allow the government to design pretty much everything they want as a state secret. Trying to leak these secrets or look for info about them (which there is no list for, so you might be doing so unknowingly) can get yet up to a 5 or 10 year prison sentence, depending of your status. Basically: the death of investigative journalism and, if you want to push further, the creation of an atmosphere of fear for anyone opening his damn mouth.
The Japanese government already has a terrible track record when it comes to cover-ups: stuff like the pollution of the town of Minamata in the 60, the infected blood incident of the 90s, the whistleblower that warned them about the state of the Fukushima plant in 2002... So it's no wonder that, beyond the simply ridiculous scope of the law, there aren't a lot of people willing to let the government have their way with this. A heavyweight of the ruling party already said the other day that anyone that was against the secrecy bill was just a terrorist. Welp.
Despite not having done any significant structural reform since he came back to power last year, and despite all the debates about women position, natality and stuff, this is for some reason the first big "achievement" Abe is striving for this hard.
For a better writeup on what all of this entails, I recommend you read the following article on Japan Times, from Jake Adelstein:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/201.../#.Up6My42gjEo
The first rule of the pending state secrets bill is that a secret is a secret. The second rule is that anyone who leaks a secret and/or a reporter who makes it public via a published report or broadcast can face up to 10 years in prison. The third rule is that there are no rules as to which government agencies can declare information to be a state secret and no checks on them to determine that they don’t abuse the privilege; even defunct agencies can rule their information to be secret. The fourth rule is that anything pertaining to nuclear energy is a state secret, which means there will no longer be any problems with nuclear power in this country because we won’t know anything about it. And what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
The law is seeing pretty strong opposition here, but unsurprisingly no demos. Most of the press organizations and the population are against the bill, which doesn't stop the government from going with it. The other day, they got the bill to pass through the lower house of the Diet right after the day-long debate broadcasted live on public television ended, as if it was nothing but a smokescreen.The law has been compared to the pre-World War II Peace Preservation Law, which was used to arrest and jail any individual who opposed the government party line. “Japan already has a very weak freedom of information act which this will cripple,” said Yutaka Saito, a member of the Japan In-House Lawyers Association task force. “The bill takes everything bad about national security laws in the U.S. and then removes all the safeguards and checks.”
There's another debate right now, I'm watching it. The upper house has been examining the bill for almost a week.
What are your thoughts on this, GAF?