Japan


	June 20, 2002	atimes.com

Japan

Koizumi will ignore defense scandal at his peril
By Axel Berkofsky

Scandals involving Japanese government ministries and agencies continue to hit the headlines.

Until recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs kept the country's press busy with corruption scandals involving high-ranking ministry officials who reportedly spend a good deal of their time misusing public funds to secure additional income, some of which was spent exploring Tokyo's nocturnal entertainment. This time, revelations about the Defense Agency illegally accumulating and storing personal data on citizens requesting information from the agency under Japan's information-disclosure law fill the front pages of the country's newspapers. The Defense Agency is the administrative organization responsible for the management, operations, etc of all of the defense forces, answerable directly to the prime minister. It is not a full-fledged ministry yet, but it is eager to change its status from agency to ministry as Japan actively participates in the US-led fight against international terrorism.

As has been revealed over the past two weeks, the Defense Agency illegally compiled lists of information seekers and deleted the evidence, while Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his cabinet were only marginally interested in finding out why and how their Defense Agency was abusing the public's right to ask what the armed forces were up to.

While Defense Agency officials and politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) initially claimed that a few officials were "overdoing their jobs taking care of national security", the affair is turning into a full-fledged scandal involving as many as 80 officers and soldiers of the Defense Agency. On May 28 it was revealed that a navy lieutenant-commander, who belonged to the information-disclosure section of the Japanese Navy, compiled a list of 141 people who had asked the Defense Agency to disclose official information between April 2001 and March 2002.

Under the information-disclosure law enacted last year, the public is authorized to request information from any government agency by leaving a name and an address. As it turned out, however, the agency used the law as a handy tool to check on the information seekers instead, conducting background investigations and storing information that goes far beyond merely soliciting a name and an address.

The lists were then made available on the agency's intranet and informed the agency's staff that citizens interested in the country's defense policies and data were either "suspicious citizens", "group members", "overly curious journalists" or "anti-war Self-Defense Force members".

The agency's feeding its officials with data on information seekers' profession, political or ideological orientation is believed to be a serious violation of the law for the protection of computerized personal data held by administrative organs, whereas Defense Agency officials claim that their lists were only for "internal reference purposes" and played no part in the decision of whether or not information should be disclosed to the citizens requesting it.

Early official statements that storing personal of information seekers was "designed to carry out tasks smoothly" were equally absurd and raised even more questions as to what task exactly it was that the officers were eager to carry out at the cost of violating a citizen's privacy.

"I have acted alone and no concerted effort was made to compile the lists," maintained the navy's lieutenant-commander at the end of May in a desperate attempt to avoid the impression that his employer's practice of compiling private data had been conducted systematically.

The agency was not at all off the hook, though, and more bad news that the information offices of the Ground and Air Self-Defense Forces, as well as the central information office at the Defense Agency, had all placed lists of information seekers on local-area computer networks (LANs) indicated that compiling private data was indeed the rule and not the exception as initially claimed.

While Defense Agency chief Gen Nakatani had no choice but to step in front of the press acknowledging that his officers and bureaucrats might indeed be engaged in illegally accumulating information, the information offices of the Defense Agency for their part got to work getting rid of evidence by removing the illegal lists from the agency's intranet.

"We were deleting the lists from the agency's intranet before it could come to light what was on them,” admitted an official from the navy's information office, which made earlier officials statements from his agency that "officers were simply unaware that distributing personal data was illegal" implausible at best.

Nakatani himself very quickly washed his hands of the affair, claiming that he only learned of the lists and his officials' unusual diligence in accumulating sensitive data after the press had exposed the issue.

"A bunch of lies," commented the opposition, and requested that Nakatani step down immediately to take responsibility for the illegal activities in the agency under his control. Nakatani dismissed the opposition's calls to resign, although he publicly apologized for the "irregularities" in his agency and promised a full in-house investigation.

The in-house investigation team, ironically made up of Defense Agency officers, got to work a few days later, distributing questionnaires among officers and all those who had access to the intranet lists.

"Interrogating all suspicious officials would take too long," explained the investigation team, while political commentators suspected that not too much self-incriminating evidence could be expected as the agency's bureaucrats and soldiers were practically being asked to accuse themselves of a crime.

The Defense Agency's counselor Tetsuya Nishikawa, head of the in-house investigation team, however, was happy with the results all the same, and announced that there had been "no cover-up whatsoever." He claimed that that the removal of the lists from the agency's intranet did not "destroy evidence because the lists were kept on file and put back on the net after the sensitive information was deleted".

The agency's and government's ill-fated fact-finding efforts became even less credible when it was learned that the LDP secretary general, Taku Yamasaki, had pressured Nakatani into not releasing the full 43-page version of the investigation report unless the opposition "forced" him to do so.

Nakatani was told to distribute a four-page summary instead that clearly turned the Defense Agency's illegal information-gathering activities from a serious crime into a trivial offense hardly worth the controversy.

On June 12, the four-page summary report was published, stating that storing data on individuals seeking information disclosure by the Defense Agency and Air and Ground Self-Defense Forces "does not pose any legal problems" and it called the accumulation of private data only "careless". The summary implausibly concluded that the "Defense Agency as a whole was not sufficiently aware of privacy rights" and promised to correct the situation with an in-house training program.

Given the quality of the findings of the one-sided in-house investigation, this, however, might be a bad idea aimed to "improve skills to spy on the public", as political analysts in Japan suspect.

Not much of a surprise that the political opposition parties immediately dismissed the report's summary and its suggestions for further on-the-job-training for the agency's staff, and they asked for the full version of the report and an independent investigation by a third party.

"The agency's report is a joke and a shameful attempt to hide the truth from the public," maintained a lawmaker from the opposition who was joined by Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan in saying that he wanted the government to "draw up a report that is not distorted by the ruling camp and the Defense Agency".

Under pressure from the opposition, the full version of the report was distributed only a few hours after the summary and Koizumi finally decided to get involved beyond being "shocked" by the revelations. He turned to Defense Agency Vice Minister Yasunari Ito, telling him to speak to the press, reportedly advising him to "show sincere remorse and explain it in a way that is easy for the public to understand". This, however, turned into hardly more than a Japanese-style "say-as-little-as-possible-and-put-on-a-sad-face" announcement that did not even convince his LDP party colleagues.

The full version of the report, as was excepted, did not please the opposition when it still referred to the Defense Agency's information-gathering activities as "inappropriate", refusing to admit that a great number of Defense Agency officials had broken a 1988 law regulating the handling of computerized personal information by government organizations.

"The report is a slap in the face of information seekers," concluded the opposition, although the government had made it clear that distributing multiple-choice questionnaires to Defense Agency staff is as investigative as it will get.

Koizumi's involvement in the affair is yet unclear, although Nakatani's refusal to answer when asked whether the Prime Minister's Office had pressured him to withhold the full version of the in-house investigation reports gives reason to believe that the premier's involvement might go beyond that of an "alarmed observer" as he has portrayed himself over the past two weeks.

An independent and second investigation of the scandal is not on the government's agenda. Instead it prefers to move on with deliberations of the country's pending national emergency laws in the Diet. The opposition, however, is now even less enthusiastic about discussing the bills and has declared a boycott of all Diet deliberations if the government refuses to come up with the truth.

Postponing debate on the national emergency laws authorizing the country's soldiers to effectively defend citizens in the event of a foreign attack might indeed not be such a bad idea after all given the fact that the Japanese government seems unable even to protect the public from its own Defense Agency.

The author of this article, by the way, has been a frequent visitor to the Defense Agency in recent years, and he cannot help but wonder whether or not he has been placed on the "nosy good-for-nothing-journalist" secret list.

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