Koichi Nakano talking:
I think it’s fair to say that since Abe Shinzo came back to power in December 2012, there has been a rightward shift that resumed in politics, both in terms of economic reforms, but also in terms of increased attention to foreign and security policy, including the possible revision of the Constitution.
the Japanese post-WWII Constitution was instituted during the occupation period by the United States. After the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And because of the military’s past that caused a great deal of damage to the region and beyond, there was a great deal of efforts to democratize and demilitarize Japan with the new Constitution after the Second World War. And it’s particularly famous for the Article 9, that renounces war and war potential as a country.
The U.S. said they couldn’t have a military. But they, in fact, have developed one under a different name. It’s called a self-defense force. And it has big capacity to defend the country. But there are still constitutional bans on Japan dispatching troops abroad, for example.
China and South Korea both condemn Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visit to the Yasukuni war shrine. Yasukuni war shrine is particularly notorious for enshrining 14 Class A war criminals. lass A war criminals are basically wartime leaders of Japan, including Prime Minister Tojo, who attacked Pearl Harbor when he was prime minister. And the Chinese government, after, in the post-war period, made peace with Japan with the understanding that the Japanese people were also victims of wartime leaders who misled the country. And so, for the Chinese, the idea that the current prime minister visits the Yasukuni Shrine, where those war criminals are enshrined, is basically to say that Japan bears no responsibility for the wartime atrocities.
Actually, there have been other prime ministers who have done that in the past, and—but it has become a taboo issue from 1985, in particular, when the Chinese government started to criticize very openly the visits by the prime minister. But before Abe in last December, Koizumi, too, while he was prime minister between 2001 and 2006, repeatedly visited the Yasukuni Shrine. And during that time period, the bilateral relationship between Japan and China were completely frozen.
Japan recently enacted state secrets law. In November, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, now Caroline Kennedy, endorsed the law, saying, “We support the evolution of Japan’s security policies, as they create a new national security strategy, establish a National Security Council, and take steps to protect national security secrets.”
The pressure coming from the U.S. has been going on for some time, and at the very latest, I think, already from 2009. And so, the bill of state secrecy has been in the pipeline for some time. And Abe, this time, seizing the opportunity by securing the majority in both houses of the Parliament, went ahead, in combination with another bill, as you just mentioned, that set up the Japanese version of the National Security Council.
state secrets is very poorly defined. It, of course, concerns primarily security issues and anti-terrorist measures. But in the parliamentary exchange, it became increasingly clear that the interpretation of what actually constitutes state secret could be very arbitrary and rather freely defined by government leaders. And, for example, anti-nuclear citizen movements can come under surveillance without their knowledge, and arrests can be made if it turns out that they obtain some information that they didn’t even know constituted state secrets.
The state secrecy law that was passed in December last year, just a month ago, basically two years after the big earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear power accident, that still continues to literally kind of shake Japan, and in the climate of anxiety and insecurity, the government basically is pushing in the classic sort of Naomi Klein kind of way of shock doctrine. And for the Japanese, it is particularly worrisome because it reminds us of what happened before the Second World War, actually, when Tokyo was destroyed by a huge earthquake in 1923. And the peace preservation law that eventually led to the birth of state secret police and the brutality of the military regime was also enacted two years right after the big earthquake that destroyed Tokyo back in the 1920s. So, the parallel is quite spooky.
The continuous contamination of water, of ocean, of the soil, and the continuous danger with the spent fuels in the nuclear reactors in Fukushima—I think there are lots of concerns, and citizens are trying to know the truth. But I think the state secrecy law is potentially going to make it easier for the government to cover up information.
– source democracynow.org
Koichi Nakano, professor at Sophia University in Tokyo and director of the Institute of Global Concern at the university.