Japanese Begin to Crack the Wall
Of Secrecy Around Official Acts
By JAMES STERNGOLD Special to The New York Times
photo;Haruyoshi Yamaguchi for The New York Times
An association of residents of the Kyodo neighborhood in Tokyo that is fighting a proposed elevated rail line has forced the secretive bureaucracy to open
a crack. Members of the association are shown at a spot by the o1d commuter line tracks that would be bought up and developed under the proposal.
TOKYO, May l4 - The residents of the pleasant middle-class neighborhood of Kyodo never imagined themselves as firebrands. But when they heared that the Government planned to improve the old commuter rail line crossing the area's narrow streets with a multibillion-dollar elevated railway, they did something extraordinary: They demanded to know why.
Traditionally, the Government bureaucracy has made such judgments in secret, and the people have simply had to endure them, with few means of taking part in the process or shaping the outcome. But faced with the destruction of their neighborhood's quiet charm, a group of Kyodo residents wanted to know why this plan had been chosen over less disruptive alternatives, like tunneling.
Unused to such meddling, the bureaucrats refused to share their analyses, so the residents sued. Even more startling, they won. Earlier this year a court forced the Tokyo municipal government to hand over a fourinch-thick binder of documents evaluating various construction methods.
The residents still must battle to revise the project, but their court victory was a watershed. lt was the first time the bureaucrats here had been forced to disclose that kind of data, and thus it became one in a growing number of signs of the unraveling of the veil behind which one of the most secretive governments in the industrialized world has operated.
The words are still quite foreign here, but a freedom of information revolution is bubbling in Japan. After struggling for years against the official barriers, the proponents of greater openness found thir cause embraced, at least in public,by the reform-minded Government that ended four decades of conservative one-party rule last summer. This is one of the substantive, if little heralded, issues behind the calls for reform that could have a profound impact on the way Japan works.
Japanese Start to Crack Wall of Secrecy
Few issues say more about Japanese democracy and what the people are up against in trying to revitalize it.
"Compared with the United States and Europe, where individual rights have always been important, it has been different in Japan," Koshiro lshida, the government minister responsible for creating greater public access, said in an interview. "We felt We had to catch up with the West after the chaos left by the war and so did not pay attention to rights. But hat attitude has to change now."
While change is in the air. few expect the new Government to move swiftIy because of what is at stake. By keeping an enormous range of information secret - from the side effects of drugs and the identity of prbducts that have violated health laws to the contents of student transcripts and the environmental impact of big construction projects - the bureaucracy and the corporations that work closely with the Government protect themselves from close public scrutiny and second-guessing.
Driven at Grass Roots
But even if the Government drags its feet on enacting tougher laws, the change is increasingly driven by grass-roots movements like the Kyodo residents' association, a major reason supporters of new legislation are encouraged.
"This has the potential for creating a revolution in our bureaucracy,"said Masao Horibe, a law professor at a leading expert in our of the most recondite corners of legal scholarship in Japan, freedom of information.
Hiroshi Miyake, a Japan Civil Liberties Union lawyer who has been fighting for tougher laws on disclosure, added: "There is no single change that would do more to weaken the bureaucracy and protect consumers than a freedom of information law. I can't overstate how much of a difference this would make to Japan."
Secrecy is an ingrained aspect of nearly every important institution in Japan. Scholars, for instance, are generally refused access to records on the origins of the imperial family. Doctors rarely tell patients when they have cancer, or the nature of drugs being prescribed. Even the minutes of the hearings of a government advisory board that has been discussing how to pry open the lid of secrecy have not been disclosed.
The case of the Odakyu train line reconstruction is one of dozens that various groups have fought in recent years, so far with mixed success, but with growing vigor. Recently, in two separate Supreme Court decisions, citizens groups were in one instance denied and in another permitted access to details of the expense account records of prefectural governors.
The focus of the current battle is passage of a national freedom of information law, patterned after the American statute. There are dozens of such laws at the local level in Japan; that is how the Kyodo residents won their suit. But the best guarantee of free access would be a national law. advocates say.
The outgoing Government promised to promote such a bill, but it was forced out of office before it could enact the legislation. The new minority Government of Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata is weak, and its life may be short, but it has renewed the pledge. At the least, the strong support for a more transparent government has created an atmosphere that is changing public expectations and,perhaps,judicial thinking.
"In our case, the court was influenced, l'm sure, by the change in politics and the new flexibility of the Government," said Takeshi Saito, the lawyer for the Kyodo residents.
A freedom-of-information
revolution grows in Japan.
"Without the change in government and the new atmosphere, I don't think we would have gotten this far."
For civil servants. it is not so much a matter of following explicit rules as a culture of secrecy that is driven into them from the moment they join the bureaucracy.
"As much as possible, you simply don't give out information to the public; that is the first principle,'' said Masao Miyamoto,a Health and Welfare Ministry bureaucrat who has become a gadfly by writing openly of the Government's secretive methods.
"When I entered the government,"said Dr. Miyamoto, an Americantrained psychiatrist, "one of the most important things I was told was: 'We control the information. When you give information to anybody, you are doing them a favor. They have. no right to this information.'"
This was evident in a case recalled by Hatsuko Yoshioka,secretary general of the Japan Housewives' Association. a consumer group. After some complaints several years ago, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government discovered that some meat shops were spiking ground beef with a chemical that keeps the meat looking red and fresh, but can cause itching and flushed faces.
The shops were ordered to stop using the chemical and to close for a short period. When the Housewives' Association asked for the names of the shops, they were refused on the grounds that it would be unfair if consumers avoided the shops after they reopened; in fact, the shops were not ordered to disclose why they had been closed down.
Mrs. Yoshioka said she was told by the Government that the local freedom of information law ordered only the release of documents and that there were no documents listing the names of the shops.
As Dr. Miyamoto pointed out, ultimately the issue goes beyond such everyday frustrations to the way the Japanese see themselves and their role in society. "If people had access to information, they would have to control themselves rather than having the government control everything," he said. "The current government structure does not allow people to become independent. That's what this new movement is about, making people independent."
The movement gathered force in the early l980's, when grass-roots groups began to push for laws on the local level. Dozens of local and prefectural governments now have such statutes.
Shigeki Okutsu heads the Citizens' Movement for a Freedom of Information Law, which by Japanese standards is a kind of guerrilla group, operating out of a tiny apartment on a back street.His group has counseled groups across the country on how to use existing laws.
He said the local laws had been successful to a surprising degree and had already begun to change some bureaucratic practices, if slowly. A large percentage of the requests, Mr.Okutsu said. come from parents seeking information about corporal punishment in schools, a practice that is generally prohibited.
For instance. a teen-ager in Tokyo charged several years ago that her nose had been bloodied by a teacher. Her parents sought the official report on the incident, but they have run into a wall of silence. First, the family was told that the school board could not open the documents because to do so would violate a rule prohibiting the release of a student's name.
When the parents explained that the name would be that of their own daughter, the board asserted that opening its files would "deeply damage the mutual trust between the education commission, the school and parents."
"The schools believe that even if they lie, no one will find out, and usually they are right," said Yukio Tsuruta, an adviser to the girl's family and the head of an association trying to halt corporal punishment.
"The parents are worried that if they protest to the schools, the teachers will retaliate against their children. So other parents never help in these cases. That is why making all this information open would change things in a very deep way."
When citizens do get a peek behind the veil, they are often startled. The Kyodo residents have learned, for instance, that the rail line improvement, first described as an effort to eliminate numerous traffic-snarling street crossings, is just part of the real plan.
"We discovered that this is an urban planning project," said Hitoshi Takashina, a leader of the Kyodo residents group. "There are new roads,road widenings, and a great deal of property development at the stations."
He added that once the group evaluates the pile of documents, it hopes to turn the case into a model for justifying a new national freedom of information law.
"I want to stress the view that our country has its own unique attitude toward this issue and a unique administrative system," said Mr. Ishlda,the Cabinet minister. "But the society is changing. We have to take account of those changes and respond appropriately."