On the night of 6 December 2013, almost the midnight, the coalition majority in the Upper House of Japan's Parliament passed the Secrecy Act, winding up the debate forcefully. It had already been passed by the Lower House, and thus became an Act, amid the widening opposition among the people. They were gradually becoming aware that this was a repressive law. The government, with absolute majorities in both houses, did not want to wait for that awakening.
The law proposes to set aside a large area of information in the hands of the government, defence and diplomacy to begin with, in the realm of secrecy and to punish those who are responsible for giving this secrecy out up to ten years of imprisonment. The people are not supposed to know even what is in that realm of secrecy. So it is a Black Act. Moreover, those who are in a position to handle the secret information, and not only they but even their family and close friends, are going to be minutely researched upon by the police and the various information agencies.
Some say that without such a law ready at hand, your allies will hesitate to share their secrecy with you. True, there has been pressure by the US upon us to have such a legislation(this kind of information may be classified as secret from now on!). But do we have to have that kind of high-level secret information at the expense of the popular rights? Is the existing criminal law not enough? The US is of course a democratic country. But she has been pressing us to delete the Article 9 from our constitution, to accept the collective right for self-defence as something exercisable, maintain their military bases at Okinawa, and so on. It is dangerous to follow everything that they say. And look at how our own government dislikes to, and is not used to, share information with the people who are supposed to be sovereign according to our constitution. They, for example, has not admitted that there exist some secret treaties with the US which the US admitted a long time ago. It is this government that wants more power, and an undefined one. Ooe Kenzaburo, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, said that this Secrecy Law changes the nature of the Japanese state without changing the constitution. Any opinion poll would show that more than half the voters will support Mr.Ooe.
The law proposes to set aside a large area of information in the hands of the government, defence and diplomacy to begin with, in the realm of secrecy and to punish those who are responsible for giving this secrecy out up to ten years of imprisonment. The people are not supposed to know even what is in that realm of secrecy. So it is a Black Act. Moreover, those who are in a position to handle the secret information, and not only they but even their family and close friends, are going to be minutely researched upon by the police and the various information agencies.
Some say that without such a law ready at hand, your allies will hesitate to share their secrecy with you. True, there has been pressure by the US upon us to have such a legislation(this kind of information may be classified as secret from now on!). But do we have to have that kind of high-level secret information at the expense of the popular rights? Is the existing criminal law not enough? The US is of course a democratic country. But she has been pressing us to delete the Article 9 from our constitution, to accept the collective right for self-defence as something exercisable, maintain their military bases at Okinawa, and so on. It is dangerous to follow everything that they say. And look at how our own government dislikes to, and is not used to, share information with the people who are supposed to be sovereign according to our constitution. They, for example, has not admitted that there exist some secret treaties with the US which the US admitted a long time ago. It is this government that wants more power, and an undefined one. Ooe Kenzaburo, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, said that this Secrecy Law changes the nature of the Japanese state without changing the constitution. Any opinion poll would show that more than half the voters will support Mr.Ooe.
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