World Perspective : JAPAN : Public Begins to Exercise Its Right to Know

Judging by the news, it has been a season of sensational cover-ups in Japan. Reports allege attempts to hide a nuclear power accident, to keep secret the key players in a housing loan fiasco and to conceal the identities of bureaucrats wining and dining each other on the public tab.

But if cover-ups once provoked little more than shrugs of resignation in Japan--a nation where government officials routinely withhold information as a duty and right--the recent events have provoked a drumbeat for disclosure.

In particular, the concealment of pertinent information regarding a sodium leak at the controversial Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor in Tsuruga last month and a $6.5-billion bailout plan for bankrupt housing loan firms have infuriated the public.

Demands for public disclosure and accountability have grown in the halls of Parliament, among citizen groups and in the pages of leading newspapers.

The question is whether the demands will remain just that--mere words--or take on real meaning in a nation with little tradition of genuine citizen involvement in public decisions based on open information.

“Among the general public, the need for a free flow of information is becoming more and more recognized,” said Kenichi Asano, a journalism professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto. “But the principle that the government doesn’t show anything to the public is very difficult to change because [officials] think the public is foolish and they have to lead foolish people.”

Recently, for instance, the government unveiled with much fanfare a 385-page report on the housing loan brouhaha--but left out the most critical information: Who loaned how much to whom?

News reports, however, have named several borrowers with links to organized crime, raising difficult questions about why taxpayers should bail out private firms for the bad judgment of lending to shady characters.

The Monju cover-up was perpetrated by private officials of the firm charged with administering Japan’s nuclear energy program. They spliced out the most damaging scenes from a video of the accident. And according to investigations so far, officials violated a number of emergency procedures, such as failing to shut down the reactor immediately after the leak occurred.

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Despite the accident--the third time the plant has been shut down since April--officials are not seriously questioning Japan’s nuclear program.

Still, the belief that better public policy can be made by broader public input is slowly growing here. “Citizen ombudsman” groups are springing up across the country and have been key in shedding light on the widespread practice of bureaucrats entertaining each other with taxpayer money.

About 200 towns and all but one of Japan’s 47 prefectures have adopted public disclosure laws. A national freedom of information act is also being debated, although actual passage is said to be two years down the road.

The local laws have serious flaws--chiefly the fact that bureaucrats often get to decide what to make public.

In one case, the Supreme Court ordered Osaka utility officials to disclose whom they entertained--citizens suspected they simply embezzled the money--but the officials did not have to comply because of a loophole in the law, said Tokuo Sakaguchi, an Osaka lawyer.

Such incidents give rise to gloomy predictions that the practice of true public disclosure is still years away in Japan.

But not everyone is pessimistic.

“At least with these laws, we can legally fight the government now,” said Shigeki Okutsu, leader of the Citizens Movement to Demand a Public Disclosure Law. “It’s a good start.”

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Nuclear Accident Cover-Up

A fast-breeder reactor in Japan was shut down last month after a sodium leak.

* Reactor type: Sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor, loop-type. This means the reactor uses fast-moving neutrons, a kind of subatomic particle, to convert uranium into more plutonium than it consumes. The newly created plutonium can be concentrated and itself used as fuel in a cycle hoped to create a virtually inexhaustible energy supply.

* Accident: On Dec. 8, 1995, liquid sodium began leaking from a secondary cooling system, leading to a reactor shutdown. No radioactive substances were released. A design flaw of thermal sensors in cooling system is believed to have caused surrounding steel casing to fracture and allow sodium coolant to leak.