Broad Arbitrariness

December 8^th is memorized as the day the Pacific War broke out by Pearl Harbor attack in 1945. The very same day in Japan, the police arrested a university student in the charge of leaking security information to an American teacher and his wife. The strict wartime regulation of information blinded the people in Japan, giving them a sense of deception by distorted announcement about the situation of war. When situation outside is not preferable, the government of Japan always becomes oppressive to the people inside. Legislation of the Designated Secrecy Act is in the same context.

The detail of the student’s case had not been revealed until 1990s, when a professor found the sentence of trial in an old document of former Ministry of Interior. According to the document, a student of Hokkaido University, Hiroyuki Miyazawa, told his English teacher, Harold Lane, and his wife about a Navy airport in Nemuro city, being suspected to be a violation of the Military Secret Protection Act. Miyazawa casually saw the airport in his trip there and the airport was well known as a harbor of Charles Lindburgh in his adventure of flying around the world in 1931. The existence of the airport was not a secret at all.

This episode explains a specific tendency of prosecution in Japan. To control the public, the government lays broad regulation on the people. That is not for arresting as much people as they can, but keeping options to arrest a designated person at anytime they want. Anti-war protestors, communists or people reluctant to cooperate with the government were arrested with violation of secrecy acts. By pretentious bureaucracy, the government kept on announcing only “victories” in sea battles against the United States even after crucial defeat in Midway, which caused consecutive retreat in the battles in the Pacific Ocean. The people in Japan had been uninformed of future possibility of disaster in the main islands.

The pass of Designated Secrecy Act in the Diet on Friday was exactly tracing that history. The act defines designated secret as about diplomacy, security, terrorism and everything harmful for the government. With the act, police grabbed tickets to arrest people at their disposal, if they find an activity of people to be harmful.

Wartime craziness, stemmed from fear against a great power, is covering Japanese government now. In addition, long time resentment against public disrespect on wartime leaders ignited revisionists to regain honor by establishing top-down style leadership as in old Japan. Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is on the top of this crusade.