Information-Rich Japan Feels Pressure to Lift Veil of Secrecy From Government : Access: Some bureaucrats say citizens do not have an intrinsic right to know what their leaders do. Some groups want to change that.

Japanese bathe in information. The 24 daily newspapers available at Tokyo newsstands immerse their readers in diplomatic minutiae, political inside-baseball and economic trivia.

Government bookstores bulge with vast stacks of ministerial white papers and blue-ribbon committee reports. Television news programs and talk shows jam the airwaves with incessant verbiage. Hot-selling magazines package the latest trends.

“Information mania” is the term used to describe data-collecting hobbyists in this highly literate and knowledge-intensive society.

But when it comes to finding out how their government works, or what goes into decisions that shape the nation’s future, Japanese are generally left in the dark.

Powerful bureaucrats prefer it that way, and some judges even reason that citizens don’t have the intrinsic right to know what their government is doing.

“Japanese bureaucrats revere secrecy,” said Yoriaki Narita, a Yokohama National University professor who is chairman of the Freedom of Information Research Council, a government advisory panel. “Our corporate management may be a model for the 21st Century, but Japan’s administrative procedures are still in the late 1800s. When it comes to politics, we’re still in feudal times.”

Narita personally advocates reforming the system with American-style “freedom of information” laws that would give ordinary people access to a wide range of government documents. But he and his council of experts stop short of rocking the boat. After meeting regularly for six years, the panel recently issued a 467-page “midterm” report that recommends caution--and further study.

“It’s a highly political problem,” Narita confided. “It would be easy if we could just get the word from the government that they truly wanted an information disclosure system. Technically, it wouldn’t be hard to set up a framework if we had the go-ahead to do something.”

Beneath the shallow surface of Asia’s leading democracy is a rigid bureaucratic regime that jealously guards its documentation and cloaks its administrative procedures in a haze of informality.

Sometimes no records are left at all when officials wield their considerable regulatory power through what is called “administrative guidance.” Instead of writing a legalistic letter, they’ll make requests and exhortations for compliance on the phone or over a cup of tea.

U.S. trade negotiators have complained about this practice, saying that the system’s lack of transparency can discourage economic competition here by American businesses accustomed to clear and open administrative procedures.

A growing number of domestic advocates are also demanding change, saying citizens must be given access to the kind of information that will foster informed participation in government. Although about 167 municipalities, prefectural (state) governments and regional agencies have implemented freedom of information laws since 1982, their effectiveness has been limited by the courts--and by recalcitrant bureaucrats.

Anti-corruption watchdog groups, environmental activists and parents concerned about problems in the schools are finding access to essential documents blocked by the very local officials who have promised to open up.

“Things are basically closed in Japan,” said Shigeki Okutsu, an official with the Tokyo-based Citizens’ Movement for Information Disclosure Laws. “The bureaucrats don’t think they have any obligation to release controversial information. The last thing they want is an open debate on their decisions.”

In Osaka, a local group calling itself the Citizens’ Ombudsman attempted to obtain records of the prefectural governor’s use of $70,000 each year for entertainment purposes. It was turned down on the grounds that disclosure would violate the “privacy” of the governor and the people he was entertaining in confidential meetings with taxpayer money.

The Osaka High Court ruled last week that the records should be released, echoing an earlier lower court decision. The governor’s office has not yet decided whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.

“They made a law that looks great on paper,” said Zenjiro Iwasaki, a tax accountant who helped found the Citizens’ Ombudsman in 1982 because he was angry about government corruption. “But when you try to use it, they claim everything is private. This is supposed to be a democracy, but we have no democratic check in the system.”

The lack of a law on information disclosure at the central government level prompted environmental activists to go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington to seek information, under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, on the cause of a 1988 nuclear reactor accident at a power plant in the northern Japan city of Fukushima. The NRC received the reports because some parts in the reactor were of U.S. manufacture.

The activists obtained a sheaf of documents--many of them originating in the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI), which regulates nuclear power in Japan. An independent analysis of this material suggested that the cause of the Fukushima mishap was not fully explained by the government.

MITI’s investigators found that the accident, in which metal fragments from a coolant circulation pump traveled into the reactor core, was caused by a faulty welding job and operational error. The activists trace the problem to a design flaw and are disputing the official version of the accident in court.

The documents in question would not have been released in Japan. Information on proposed nuclear power plants and on the safety records of those in operation is piecemeal, largely available only through local governments with freedom of information laws on the books.

To appease the public’s rising mistrust of nuclear power, MITI started a data bank in September, “Atom-Net,” which makes declassified reports and ministerial press releases freely available to anyone with a personal computer. About 50 users log on every day, said Takehiro Seto, spokesman for the Nuclear Power Safety Information Research Center, which operates the data bank.

“Up until now, there’s been much suspicion that information is being hidden,” Seto said. “In fact, a great deal of information has been released. It just doesn’t find its way to the general public.”

Narita, the Yokohama National University professor, said it was too soon to know whether Atom-Net will provide a meaningful service. It may appeal more to “information mania” enthusiasts than to serious researchers, he added.

The central bureaucracy’s position on opening up records with an information disclosure law is that problems would far outweigh the benefits to society. Masao Matsumura, director of government information systems at the Management and Coordination Agency, said not enough attention has been paid yet to the “demerits” of openness.

“We don’t think in terms of citizens being able to seek information based on their right to know,” Matsumura said. “That hasn’t been the spirit behind any of our laws until now. It would be a drastic change if anybody could go to a government agency to demand information, and fight it in court if disclosure was denied.”

Matsumura reasons that constitutional guarantees of open courtrooms in Japan prohibit “in camera” proceedings, often used in freedom of information cases in the United States, in which disputed information remains sealed while being reviewed in the privacy of a judge’s chambers. State and corporate secrets could easily be leaked to the public, he fears, when refusals to disclose information are appealed to the courts.

Indeed, Japan has no law guarding national security secrets. The right wing of the Liberal Democratic Party has advocated such legislation for years, only to be stymied by the public’s still strong memories of chilling prewar press censorship and totalitarianism.

Ruling party conservatives have lined up with bureaucrats opposing an information disclosure law until their proposed “spy prevention act” passes Parliament. The opposition, meanwhile, makes it a ritual to introduce some form of a freedom of information bill nearly every year, only to have it die in committee.

For the first time, however, freedom of information legislation now stands a good chance of passing Parliament’s upper house, where the opposition gained a majority last year.

Success in that chamber won’t necessarily get a law enacted but it could place the initiative into the hands of proponents of reform, rather than in the government’s moribund advisory council.

Matsumura, the information systems official, believes that most Japanese support the idea of powerful and benevolent bureaucrats working for the public good behind an opaque screen.

“Administrative procedures may be well codified and transparent in the United States, but our duties are far more broad,” Matsumura said. “People have high expectations that we’ll do all kinds of things for them, and our informal role is very large. This is in the Japanese consciousness.”

The notion that government should be transparent or that citizens should supervise the activities of public servants as well as elected officials is “revolutionary in the Japanese context,” said Narita, the scholar and advisory council chairman.

“The heavier a subject is, the farther away from the people the discussion gets and the fewer records are left,” Narita said. “Politicians and bureaucrats would go to a tea house to talk about things. Few really important decisions would be illuminated by a freedom of information system.”

Okutsu, of the Citizen’s Movement for Information Disclosure Laws, said he was stunned by the pervasiveness of this administrative culture when he contacted the mayor of Naha, Okinawa, with an invitation to speak at a freedom of information conference in April.

Mayor Kosei Oyadomari had gained media attention for squaring off with the central government’s Defense Agency in backing a controversial request filed under Naha’s freedom of information ordinance. Some citizens demanded the release of information on an anti-submarine warfare operations center in the city.

But Oyadomari asked Okutsu not to send him a written invitation. The mayor wanted to talk it over informally with city officials first, before deciding whether to participate. He apparently did not want any record of his being invited, should he decline to attend.

“We were really surprised that this culture of informal decision-making remained so strongly rooted even in Naha, where freedom of information is so advanced,” said Okutsu. “True democracy is a matter of process, not just appearances, and that’s something that hasn’t caught on in Japan.”