Japan’s Evolving National Security Secrecy System: Catalysts and Obstacles

This paper sheds light on a relatively unexplored component of Japan’s security architecture: the national security secrecy system. Among the protection measures underpinning this system, particular attention is paid to the legal aspects. This system has been caught between two competing pressures. On the one hand, the United States and domestic conservative forces have consistently sought to strengthen what they consider to be an unsatisfactory system of safeguarding national security secrets in Japan. On the other, left-leaning political actors, the media and public opinion, informed by the norm of antimilitarism – understood as a deep distrust of Japan’s military establishment and opposition to its foreign deployment, and also broadly predicated on fear of democratic retreat – have been able to thwart these attempts. As a result, Japan lacks a specific anti-espionage or state secrets law and has earned the reputation of a “spy heaven” where foreign agents, domestic collaborators and information leakers have been able to act with seeming impunity. However, rising bilateralism – under which Japan acts to consolidate alliance relations with its superpower patron – in the security and intelligence fields over the past decade and the subsequent pressures from the United States, a dissatisfied ally, facilitated by the rise of regional security threats and a shift in the domestic political terrain, have contributed to an incremental erosion of the antimilitaristic constraints on the legal component of Japan’s security secrecy system. Japanese governments have moved to bolster the secrecy protection regime, although reforms are not as significant as what they would be absent residual antimilitarism.

日本國家安全保密制度的演變：誘因與障礙

本文考察了日本的安全架構中一個相對來說較少被涉及的領域：國家安全保密制度。在支撐這個系統的保護措施中，本文特別關注的是其法律方面的問題。該系統被夾在兩個相互競爭的壓力之間。一方面，美國和日本國內的保守勢力一直試圖加強他們認為是不盡人意的國家安全秘密保衛系統。另一方面，受反軍國主義理念影響的左傾政治勢力、媒體與公眾輿論則對日本的軍事系統極度不信任並反對其在國外的部署，此外還有日本社會普遍存在的認為軍國主義會威脅民主進程的擔憂， 所有這些都有效地阻止了前者實現其努力。其結果是，日本缺乏具體的反間諜或國家保密法，而成為了外國特工、通敵者和洩密者可以不受懲罰地進行活動的“間諜天堂”。然而，日本在過去十年里為鞏固與其超級大國守護神的同盟關係而在安全和情報領域實行互惠主義，由此而面臨了來自其不滿意的盟友美國的壓力，再加上區域安全威脅的上升和國內政治形勢的轉變，這都日益消解了反軍國主義原則對日本安全保密制度的法律限制。目前日本政府已經開始加強其保密體制，但由於尚存的反軍國主義力量，其改革的程度尚不顯著。

Translated from English by Xin Huang