Right-to-Know Law Changing Shape of Japan

When environmentalists in southern Japan started worrying that the chemical runoff from a proposed golf course would pollute an unspoiled island, they asked local officials for a copy of the environmental impact report--and were told that it was none of their business.

“In democratic countries like America, this may seem hard to believe, but the reason they gave was that ordinary people would not be able to understand the technical language,” said attorney Ryuji Nishida.

Last month, Nishida won a court order requiring the Kagoshima prefectural government to hand over the environmental report. But until last week, Japan had no law requiring disclosure of such information at the national level.

After a 20-year struggle by citizens groups, parliament has passed Japan’s first freedom of information law, striking a landmark blow for openness and accountability in what has been one of the world’s most opaque democracies.

“I feel that we’ve finally joined the club of developed nations,” said Yuichi Goto, a baker and citizen activist who has been crusading for financial accountability in government.

The information disclosure law for the first time gives Japanese--and foreigners--the right to request and receive details on anything from how the central government spends tax money to how it evaluates environmental hazards.

Law Might Have Lessened Recession

The need for the law is clear to those who charge, for example, that Japan’s banking disaster--fingered as one major culprit in the current Asian economic recession--might have been addressed years earlier had the public and parliament been privy to what the mandarins at the Finance Ministry knew about the staggering dimensions of the banks’ bad loans.

For more than a decade, Japan has had ordinances requiring local governments to disclose information to the public. But stiff opposition, first from Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party and then from its powerful bureaucracy, had delayed adoption of a national “right to know” law.

The compromise version of the law passed last week is weaker than reformers would have liked. Among other things, it will be two years before anyone is actually allowed to request information, to give ministries and agencies time to prepare for what is expected to be a tsunami of demands for documents.

Nevertheless, the mere anticipation of the law has already begun changing the way Japan Inc. does business, with ministries opening up Internet home pages and bureaucrats girding themselves to do business under a previously unthinkable degree of public scrutiny.

“This will change the shape of this country to a great extent,” declared lawmaker Satsuki Eda, a former judge now with the opposition Democratic Party who helped negotiate the bill’s final form.

Japan’s modern government has been “a very closed system” since its inception in 1868, and despite the advent of democracy, “the democratic spirit hasn’t been implanted,” Eda said. “The information disclosure law may become a very, very strong weapon for the ordinary citizen to open the door of the secretive administration of this country.”

Lawmakers Will Use Disclosure Ruling

Ironically, among the first to use the law will be members of parliament. Opposition parties have long complained that the brilliant and wily bureaucrats who wield much of the real power in this country are so parsimonious with information that it is difficult even for lawmakers to evaluate and shape policy independently.

“The basic information that should underlie any public debate was inadequate,” said Shigeki Okutsu, secretary-general of Action for Public Access. Now the nonprofit group has begun running seminars and workshops aimed at teaching national and local lawmakers, as well as grass-roots activists, how to use the new disclosure law to allow broader citizen and lawmaker participation in government.

“We don’t even know what information exists,” he said. “At least with the new disclosure law, we can find [that] out, so we can make specific demands for information.”

To help, his group is trying to enlist “silver agents”--retired civil servants who know where the pork, waste and other bureaucratic bodies are buried, and are willing to help ferret them out.

Okutsu’s challenge is to interest Japanese citizens in taking a more assertive posture toward a government that has long been viewed as remote, lofty and unapproachable. As a result, Okutsu said, many people have been either content to let the government handle their affairs or convinced that to try to shape government policy was futile.

“We are at the starting line, but will we run ahead or crawl like a turtle?” Okutsu asked.

Japanese attorneys, academics and activists have been lobbying for disclosure since the 1970s, when the Lockheed bribery scandal and Japan’s failure to ban the birth-defect-causing drug thalidomide for 10 months after sales had been stopped in the U.S. and Europe spotlighted the dearth of independent watchdogs.

“We heard about the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and decided to try to introduce it in Japan,” said Mikio Akiyama, director of the Japan Civil Liberties Union, who drafted the JCLU’s first proposed bill in 1979.

The bill won’t be of immediate use either to scholars or to busybodies because diplomatic records, criminal records and other data deemed private will not be subject to disclosure. Japanese won’t even be able to get access to their own medical records, Akiyama said.

The government will have great leeway to refuse to disclose information deemed damaging to national security or foreign relations. Japanese courts will not be permitted to review such material before ruling on its release, according to Akiyama. And the notes, diaries and date books of public officials probably won’t be considered fair game.

“A society where people don’t feel free to write down what they think because everything must be disclosed would not be a good place,” Akiyama said. “It would have a chilling effect on free thought and free speech.”

Trade secrets also are generally protected from disclosure. However, electronic data are specifically included. And, in a provision that Akiyama claims goes further than U.S. law, information that has direct bearing on public health or safety must be released, even if disclosure infringes privacy, property or corporate secrecy rights.

“This is the first time in Japanese modern history that records are finally in the hands of the sovereign power of the people. It is radical,” said Shohei Muta, who follows freedom of information issues at the nonprofit Japan Center for International Exchange.

Even in the U.S., which has a long tradition of the public’s “right to know,” it took nearly 20 years to pass an enforceable Freedom of Information Act, which became truly functional only after being amended in 1974, Muta said. “In Japan, the public doesn’t have an awareness that we have a right to know.”

Implementing the new law probably will prove expensive, difficult and slow, Muta and other experts said.

First, there will be problems finding what is requested. Japan does not have a uniform system for filing or preserving documents, and attempts to agree on one have gone nowhere for a decade. Second, the current archives law allows huge wiggle room for heads of ministries to decide to hold on to some documents even after the 30-year disclosure date passes. Third, quasi-government organizations, which do a great deal of vital public business in Japan, are not covered, although the law says their status will be reviewed in two years.

Finally, some activists worry about what might disappear in the two years before disclosure begins.

“They’ll burn all the [incriminating] documents,” said Toshiaki Takahashi, attorney for the Ombudsman citizens group, which has been suing local governments up and down Japan to force them to confess to wining, dining and other high living at public expense.

Such predictions are not as paranoid as they seem. In the past year alone, Japanese newspaper readers have learned that Nagano officials admitted burning the records of their successful bid for the 1998 Winter Olympics lest embarrassing details come to light on exactly how they entertained visiting International Olympic Committee members. And Defense Agency officials mired in a messy procurement scandal admitted purging their filing cabinets as well.

“Because of the new law, they have to assume that any record they create will be opened in the future,” Muta said. “This was not the case in the past; they felt they had every right to destroy or hide documents.”

Even critics say the bureaucrats realize that the age of “transparency” is upon them. There will even be a government agency charged with helping citizens file requests for information.

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.