Incompetent Defense Leadership

Day after day, it gets obvious that the Specific Secret Protection Act can make all kinds of information hidden from eyes of the people. While the basic concept of the legislation has been to protect security information shared by allied governments, the bill was distorted by bureaucrats in order to occupy every sort of information useful for subordinate the people. Democracy in this country is in such a primitive level.

In the discussion at the Special Committee on National Security of the House of Representative on Monday, an officer for Ministry of Defense reiterated that every kind of information would be recognized as secrets. The Vice-chief of Defense Policy Bureau, Rou Manabe, answered that “It generally is possible to be applied to specific secret,” to questions about what kind of information the Self-defense Force could obtain in their activity in Iraq reconstruction assistance by lawmaker Gaku Hashimoto, a son of former Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto.

It is highly skeptical that Manabe is an appropriate person to answer on this issue in the committee. As the Chief of Okinawa Defense Bureau, he made a speech to his staffs inducing them to vote a specific candidate in the mayoral election of City of Ginowan, where Futenma Marine Airbase is located. His activity was doubted as a violation of National Civil Service Law, which requires neutrality to national civil servants.

His predecessor was replaced with an ugly talk that resembled secret submission of assessment documents for Futenma relocation to local government of Okinawa as raping women, saying “Do you think a man would say to a woman that he would rape her?” That showed a culture of bureaucrats in Ministry of Defense.

That kind of bureaucrats is deeply involved in writing the draft of Specific Secret Protection Act. They are too careful in protecting information from allied countries to balance security necessity and preservation of human rights to access public information. In other words, they are too incompetent to distinguish information to be classified from that not to be released. Security alliance, as its consequence, would be kept on jeopardized as long as those bureaucrats exist.

As a second guess, they might have been smart enough to block establishing stronger ties with allied countries, especially the United States. As is well known, Ground Self-defense Force is relatively skeptical to U.S. involvement in Japan’s security, while Marine Self-defense Force is not so much. Even if the bill is not going to pass the Diet, it will be ok for them. The Japanese are in such a poor situation as that selfish leadership trains the nation.