Abe passes secrecy bill

Japan Secures Final Passage Of Secrecy Bill - Designed by Kafka & Inspired By Hitler?!!

Zero Hedge,

6 November, 2013

Shinzo Abe secured final passage of a bill granting Japan’s govt sweeping powers to declare state secrets. The Bill won final approval of the measures at about 11:20 p.m. Tokyo time after opposition parties first forced a no-confidence vote in Abe’s govt in the lower house. The first rule of the pending Japan’s Special Secrets Bill is that what will be a secret is secret. The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know. It might all seems like a bad joke, except for the Orwellian nature of the bill and a key Cabinet member expressing his admiration for the Nazis, "just as Germany needed a strong man like Hitler to revive defeated Germany, Japan needs people like Abe to dynamically induce change." 

Submitted by Subcultureist of Japan's Subculture Research Center blog,

The first rule of the pending Japan’s Special Secrets Bill is that what will be a secret is secret. The second rule is that anyone who leaks a secret and a reporter who writes it up can face up to ten years in jail. The third rule is that there are no rules at to what government agency can declare state secrets and no checks on them to determine they don’t misuse the privilege; even of no longer existent agencies may have the power to declare their information secret. The fourth rule  is that anything pertaining to nuclear energy is of course a state secret so there will not longer be any problem 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The right to know has now been officially superseded by the right of the government to make sure you don’t know what they don’t want you to know.

Legal experts note that even asking pointed questions about a state secret, whether you know or don’t know it’s a secret, could be treated as “instigating leaks” and the result in an arrest and a possible jail term up to five years. Of course, the trial would be complicated since the judge would not be allowed to know what secret the accused was suspected of trying to obtain.

Ask the wrong question, five years in jail. 

And of course, trials about state secrets, would by the nature of the law, also be secret trials and closed to the public.

At this point in time, no one has really claimed authorship of the secrecy bill. The author is a secret. Kafka would seem the most likely scrivener for this perplexing legislation, if he was still alive, but ruling coalition members acknowledge that another famous white man from the past may have provided the real inspiration for the bill and its implementation.

An Upper House member of the Diet said on background to JSRC, “Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro sort of telegraphed the punches of the administration by expressing his admiration for how the Nazi Party forcefully changed the German constitution this summer.

Obviously, we’re not Nazis in Japan–because we hardly have any Jews, but we are like the defeated post World War I Germany in that we do not have the right to wage war to defend ourselves from our enemies. Just as Germany needed a strong man like Hitler to revive defeated Germany, Japan needs people like Abe to dynamically induce change.”

Whistleblowers and journalist face up to ten years in jail for exposing anything the Japanese government declares “a special secret.” And what is a “special secret”–that is also secret.

In August this year, Aso Taro, who is also the Finance Minister stated at a seminar, “Germany’s Weimar Constitution was changed into the Nazi Constitution before anyone knew. It was changed before anyone else noticed. Why don’t we learn from that method?”

It’s obvious that the Abe administration which pushed this bill into the Diet without public hearings and even the standard deliberations with Japan’s legal establishment has been an apt pupil of their German predecessors. They even attempted to pass the bill in the middle of the night yesterday while most of Japan was sleeping. The administration hasn’t been able to set a fire to the Diet building to justify a harsher crackdown but the LDP Secretary General was kind enough to say that those noisily protesting the bill were committing “terrorist acts.”

The hawkish Prime Minister Abe has publicly stated his ambition to revise Japan’s constitution to rid it of Article 9, which forbids Japan from waging war. Upper house Diet member, Taro Yamamoto and others have publicly stated they believe the current bill is a stepping-stone to recreate a fascist Japan, as it existed prior to the Second World War.

It might all seems like a bad joke, except for the Orwellian nature of the bill being proposed and a key Cabinet member expressing his admiration for the Nazis.

Japan passes a democracy-muzzling Patriot Act

SEOUL, South Korea — Asia's rapidly mounting tensions just helped deliver a blow against democracy, with the Obama administration's backing.

Global Post,

6 December, 2013

The context: In late November, Chinadeclared an “air defense identification zone” in airspace over the disputed Senkaku (Diaoyu to China) islands, whichJapan controls. On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden raised hackles over this provocative step with Chinese president Xi Jinping, in what he called a “very direct” meeting.

China’s move was arguably intended to test Japan’s mettle.

Ironically, it is helping Japan’s right-wing prime minister, Shinzo Abe, advance his quest for a more muscular Japan.

Abe’s party sailed to electoral victory on platform that included revising the constitution, to undo a post-World War II policy of pacifism and allow the country to raise a standing army.

They haven’t yet succeeded in doing that. But in a rare late-night parliament vote Friday night, they achieved another key goal by passing a controversial security measure: the Bill on the Protection of State Secrets — essentially Japan’s version of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The Obama administration, which has long complained of intelligence leaks in Japan, supported the bill.

The absence of a wider-reaching bill had made Japan’s pursuit of whistleblowers somewhat lax compared to its neighbors, hampering intelligence-sharing efforts, backers argue. They also contend that Japan needs a centralized statute to prosecute state secret leakers; it had relied on separate laws applying to civil servants and national defense service members.

Although protests are far from common in Japan, thousands of demonstrators amassed outside parliament this week. Many fear the government is steamrolling whistleblowers and free speech in pursuit of a stronger alliance with its mighty ally.

They claim the text is poorly written, and has been pushed through hastily and secretively. “The government has not said exactly what will become secret,” explains Aki Wakabayashi, director of Transparency International Japan, and a whistleblower who once exposed lavish government trips paid out of a secret national security budget. “So the law could allow the government to withhold more information and ultimately undermine Japan’s democracy.”

Here are four disturbing ways the bill could be a democracy muzzler.

It defines terrorism as imposing one’s opinions on others.

On November 29, ruling party lawmaker Shigeru Ishiba lashed out at demonstrations near the Diet building in Tokyo, writing in his blog that protesting the bill is “seems not so different” from an act of terrorism.

Ishiba quickly retracted his statement. But his vitriol outraged critics, who raised fears about the obfuscated and strangely targeted definition of “terrorism” in the bill. According to Article 12, terrorism is partially defined as an activity that forces “political and other principles or opinions on the state or other people.”

In other words, throw up a rowdy anti-government protest, and the judiciary can find a reason to lock you away.

It criminalizes investigative journalism

Journalists can be prosecuted for “improperly accessing” classified documents or “conspiring” to leak them.

Even asking an official to take a look at classified documents could constitute “conspiracy,” leading to up to five years in prison. “Instigating” the release of government secrets, meanwhile, carries up to 10 years in the dock.

The government denies this, proclaiming that free speech will continue to be protected under the Constitution. It has also incorporated hazy safeguards, including a line in the bill that agencies must “take into consideration” human rights and freedom of the press.

But what exactly does that mean? Protestors aren’t reassured.

Basically, anything can be a secret

The act gives heads of government agencies near-total power over classifying state secrets under four categories: diplomacy, defense, counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

The problem is, administrators can make the opaque decisions to classify a document even if their work hardly relates to national security. That effectively allows them to hide any embarrassing piece of evidence, and then pursue the journalists and bloggers who make it public.

The act may conflict with the freedom of information law.

It’s unclear how the act will impact the 1999 freedom of information law, which grants citizens the right to request disclosures and lays out the government’s responsibilities in doing so.

In all likelihood, officials will probably use the state secrets bill to refuse requests, acting in line with the freedom of information law’s broad exemptions for releases that could harm national security or public order, writes Joel Rheuben, a Japanese law specialist.

Is democracy under threat in Japan? Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has agreed to set up an agency that would monitor the information that’s made secret. But that’s only a promise, not a provision actually included in the bill — the sort of vagueness that critics are going after in the first place.