A new bill reveals the Japanese government’s authoritarian streak

FOR several weeks Japan’s Diet has been debating a law that would punish people who plan to commit crimes. The government says the conspiracy bill will protect the nation from terrorism. In a country where crime has fallen to a record low (a single fatal shooting was recorded for the whole of 2015) and where the last big terrorist attack was more than 20 years ago, that justification sounds feeble to many.

Japan’s federation of bar associations questions whether the police need more powers. It says they can use existing laws to pursue criminal conspiracies. Critics of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suspect ulterior motives. “The need for a new law is very small but the dangers of having the law are enormous,” says Takeshi Shina of the Democratic Party, the main opposition. Passage of the bill, he argues, will lead to an erosion of personal liberty: “The government is far more passionate about the freedom of the state to act than about protecting the constitutional rights of the individual.”

To be fair, the LDP, which has dominated Japanese politics for 60 years, has never hidden its authoritarian streak. It wants to do away with the liberal constitution imposed by Japan’s American occupiers in 1947. It dislikes the way the document renounces war, diminishes the status of the emperor and makes ringing declarations about the inviolability of fundamental human rights.

A draft of an alternative constitution endorsed by the LDP tosses out these ideas and replaces them with duties to the state. The national anthem and flag must be respected. Rights come with “responsibilities and obligations” and citizens “must comply with the public interest and public order”. Freedom of speech can be restricted if it impedes that. Most alarmingly, says Lawrence Repeta of Meiji University, the prime minister would be empowered to declare a national emergency under “an extremely broad and undefined range of potential circumstances”. Mr Repeta considers the document a blueprint for the abolition of Japan’s liberal democracy.

Privately, some LDP politicians accept that the draft, written by hardliners while the party was briefly in the political wilderness, goes too far. “Nobody takes it seriously,” says Tsuneo Watanabe of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, a think-tank. If the party really intended to sell the draft to voters, he says, it would have produced a more appealing document. The LDP’s tilt rightwards since returning to power in 2012, however, suggests that the draft increasingly influences public policy.

Last year a UN special rapporteur criticised the government of Shinzo Abe for trying to intimidate the media by making a pointed reference to its power to shut down “biased” television channels under the law that regulates broadcasting. In 2013 the LDP pushed through a law that allows the government to declare all kinds of information state secrets, in spite of strong public opposition and noisy protests by journalists, lawyers and scholars. In theory, the law will help deepen co-operation on security between Japan and America, which had complained about a series of leaks of sensitive information. In practice, it has raised fears that seeking or revealing data about perfectly legitimate subjects, such as the extent of contamination from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, could be construed as criminal activity.

Few in the LDP want to return to the past, insists Yoshimasa Hayashi, an LDP MP, although he does concede that some want to tug it “too far right.” Still, he supports the conspiracy law, which he says will help keep the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 safe. The LDP’s dominance of both chambers of the Diet means the law will probably pass without trouble. It is the lack of a strong opposition that should most worry ordinary Japanese, says Mr Shina. The LDP may not be too worried about constraints on the power of the state, but in a healthy democracy, someone should be.