Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 13. februar 2006 / Time Line February 13, 2006
Version 3.512. Februar 2006, 14. Februar 2006
02/13/2006
Japanese democracy took a large step backwards with the arrest
and conviction of three people for posting antiwar fliers
By David McNeill
Is Obora Toshiyuki a threat to society? The Japanese state
certainly seems to think so. The police arrested the bespectacled,
47-year-old elementary school worker, interrogated him in grueling
five-hour stretches and held him in detention for 75 days. “I
thought it would never end,” says Obora, who claims the
arrest came “out of the blue.”
After confiscating his computer and rifling through his personal
belongings, the police called his workplace from where he was
forced to take 10 months leave and a 60 percent pay cut.
Prosecutors demanded a six-month prison term. When a district court
threw the charge out, the state spent thousands of hours and
millions of yen challenging the decision and fighting it in the
Tokyo High Court.
Few would feel much sympathy for a teacher embezzling funds or,
heaven forbid, molesting children in his care, but Obora was guilty
of distributing scraps of printed paper to grown adults suggesting
they ‘think deeply’ about Japan’s decision to
support a costly and illegal war. The flier, to members of
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and their families, asked
rhetorically: “Would George Bush or Koizumi Junichiro go to
fight a war in Iraq?”
It is perhaps the oldest form of modern political activity –
dating back to 17th century pamphleteering, but the High Court
decided last December that the danger it posed to SDF members
required a conviction for trespassing and a fine of 100,000 yen.
Obora and his two co-defendants Onishi Nobuhiro and Takada Sachimi
were stunned. “This is like delivering the final blow to
Japan’s democracy,” said Takada.
An overreaction perhaps? “This case is crucial,” says
Professor Lawrence Repeta, a faculty member of Omiya Law School.
“Here we have ordinary citizens being arrested for handing
out fliers. This is the most traditional means of free expression.
The government must carry a very heavy burden to justify a
restriction on people expressing their opinions on an important
matter of public policy in this fashion. And in my view they have
shown nothing at all to justify their actions.”
Obora’s team of antiwar activists, Tachikawa Jieitai Kanshi
Tento Mura (Tachikawa SDF monitoring tent village) has campaigned
peacefully in the western Tokyo area for quarter of a century. The
group was founded in 1972 to prevent the SDF from occupying land
vacated by the departing US Military and uses classic antiwar
tactics: sit downs, peaceful obstruction and propagandizing.
Over the years, the group has fought, with mixed results, against
the SDF occupation, the dispatch of US troops to Vietnam and the
construction of a military runway. By the time they were raided on
February 27, 2004, Tent Mura was one of the oldest protest groups
in Tokyo and had shrunk to seven, mostly middle-aged activists who
shared a cluttered second-story office in Tachikawa.
So on January 17, 2004 when Obora and his colleagues went to the
Tachikawa SDF housing complex on Jan. 17, 2004, hoping their fliers
would be noticed among the piles of junk advertising that clogs up
postboxes all over Japan, it was business as usual. “We had
been doing this since the previous autumn,” says Obora.
“And we had been distributing newspapers outside bases and
sending direct mail since the early 1970s. We stopped for a while
because we didn’t think it was having any impact.”
They believed, however, that amongst the hundreds of families in
the complex, some were likely to oppose Japan’s first
dispatch of troops to a war zone since the Second World War, a
belief supported by public opinion surveys. A Nippon Television
poll in November 2003, for example, found 71 percent of the
population against the deployment, less than two months before the
troops left for Iraq.
The activists walked past a small sign banning unauthorized people
from entering the complex, just as dozens of other people hawking
pizzas, family restaurants and membership in religious
organizations did every week. The complex is not part of the SDF
base and has no barriers. On February 22, two of the activists paid
another visit, the last before they were arrested for trespassing
at the end of that month.
Their arrest was troubling enough, but what followed was
‘outrageous’, says Repeta. “The prosecutors said
they had to hold these people for 75 days because they needed more
information, but the activists admitted what they did.” So
why were they being held? Intimidation, he says. “For the
authorities to lock up harmless people like this for such a lengthy
period is a clear violation of the principles of Japan’s
Constitution and of human rights treaties Japan has entered. This
violates any basic standard of due process.”
The prosecution argued that this was a straightforward case of
criminal trespass, but Obora says comments by police during his
interrogation make it clear that the arrests were political.
“One of the police officers said ‘it would be very
interesting to survey to what extent the number of antiwar postings
to SDF complexes has decreased compared to before your
arrest.’ That and other comments by prosecutors convince me
that the political intent was to destroy the antiwar
movement.”
Has it succeeded? No, says antiwar campaigner and local Kanagawa
Prefecture councilor Nishimura Ayako, who nevertheless acknowledges
it has had a chilling impact. “Most activists when they hear
of a case like this conclude: well, this is the terrible era
we’re in so we have to keep up our game.’ We
won’t be intimidated so easily. But I’m sure some
activists will think twice before setting foot in an SDF complex
again.”
The detention of Obora and his colleagues came to the attention of
rights groups, including Amnesty International, which labeled them
“prisoners of conscience.” To their relief, Hachioji
district Judge Hasegawa Kenichi dismissed the charge, calling the
arrest “questionable” and pointedly referring to
Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of
expression.
But as in so many cases in a country that convicts over 99 percent
of defendants in criminal cases, the higher the judiciary, the more
conservative the ruling. Tokyo High Court presiding judge Nakagawa
Taketaka dismissed the argument that the three were exercising
their constitutional right to express a point of view, saying such
a right did not mean they could “enter (the facility) against
the manager’s will.”
The judge rejected Hasegawa’s view that (a) the no-trespass
sign was ‘inconspicuous’ and (b) that any damage caused
by the defendants was ‘extremely minor,’ studiously
refusing to acknowledge the wider implications of the case. Thus,
the apartment building manager’s right was, in Repeta’s
words, considered ‘absolute’; “the three-page
opinion issued by the Tokyo High Court doesn’t even bother to
balance the constitutional right of free speech against the
building owner’s property rights.” He adds:
“It’s hard to imagine that an appellate court in any
sophisticated democracy would simply convict these people without
such an analysis.”
The arrest and conviction of the Tachikawa Three is part of a wider
crackdown against the pacifist movement in Japan -- directed by the
public security police – as the government moves to revise
the ‘peace clause’ or Article Nine of the
Constitution.?One week after the original case against the
Tachikawa protestors was thrown out of Hachioji District Court, for
instance, Arakawa Yousei, who is head priest at Choeiji Buddhist
Temple in Tokyo, was detained for a remarkably similar
‘offence’ under the direction of the same public
security official.
Arakawa Yousei
Arakawa was distributing antiwar leaflets produced by the
Japan Communist Party in an apartment complex in Katsushikaku,
northeast Tokyo, when a man on the third floor challenged him.
“He said ‘Are you the asshole that has been putting
that stuff in my door,’” says Arakawa. “So I said
if it is causing you trouble I won’t do it again, but he
called the police.” Two squad cars and two officers on
bicycles arrived within minutes to detain a 58-year-old, 140-lb
priest who was eager to explain his activities.
“Somebody had decided this was to be treated as a serious
crime, like murder or robbery,” says Arakawa who believes he
was set up. “The man who challenged me used police terms like
‘PC’ (patrol car) when he was on the phone.” He
was brought to Kameari Police Station where he said that he had
been campaigning for 10 years and was not a member of the JCP but a
supporter of their antiwar activities. “After two hours of
this I said I wanted to go home because I had things to do, but
they said, ‘actually you’re under arrest.’ I had
no idea you could be arrested for such a thing.” He was held
for 23 days.
Arakawa is preparing for his eighth appearance in the Tokyo
District Court where his lawyer, Nakamura Ousuke, will ask police
witnesses why they did not inform the priest he was being arrested.
“They broke the law, but they have higher priorities,”
says Nakamura. “For them, people like Mr. Arakawa who
distribute information warning people what will happen if they
change the Constitution are like a cancer. It grows unless you cut
it out.” Says Arakawa: “Today it is me. Who will it be
tomorrow?”
Other priests, perhaps; men such as Rev. Kizu Hiromitsu, a
well-known pacifist campaigner who was detained outside Kadena Air
Base in Okinawa last year. Supporters say he was distributing
fliers outside the base when he was stopped by police and
handcuffed to a patrol car after he questioned what law was being
applied. When the car moved off with him still attached, he
protested and was arrested for police obstruction; he was held for
21 days.
Kizu Hiromitsu
“The authorities want to scare people off,” says Obora,
who is challenging his conviction in the Supreme Court. “We
have a chilling situation where the police are now permitted free
reign and can justify even such an arrest as ours.”
The fate of Obora and his colleagues resonates far beyond the
confines of the small patch of west Tokyo they have made home for
over 30 years. Free-speech advocates see their trial as a crucial
test of the limits of constitutional freedom in Japan, one reason
why over 100 law professors, including Repeta, have signed a
declaration protesting their convictions. “There seems to be
no question that this case is part of a broad campaign by
government officials to intimidate people who distribute
information they don’t like,” he says.
But the ramifications of the case also ripple upwards to the
hawkish heart of Japan’s government which gives increasingly
clear signals about the country’s future course. Minister of
Foreign Affairs Aso Taro, for example, offered this defense for
official visits to the Yasukuni war memorial on TV Asahi’s
Hodo Station at the end of January: “If we don’t pay
respect to those who died in the war, people will no longer want to
fight for their country.”
Pronouncements like this make clear that the Yasukuni visits are
part of a coordinated effort by Japan’s leadership to shed
the postwar political architecture that has kept Japan out of
conflict for 60 years, and do not simply spring from some emotional
attachment to the past. They also suggest that the constitutional
ban on force is seen as a distasteful anachronism, an impediment,
like the bothersome antiwar protestors, to the flowering of the
‘real’ Japan. That this movement is led by politicians
like Aso and Abe Shinzo – the grandsons of men who steered
the country to such disaster before the Constitution was written --
is an irony worth savoring.
The fates of modest men like Obora, Arakawa and Kizu are small
portends of history in a struggle for Japan’s future. That
struggle has entered a new phase in moving from outside military
bases to inside the law courts. As US Sen. Max Baucus recently said
in a criticism of President George W. Bush’s contempt for the
rules of parliamentary democracy: “This is the way democracy
ends, Not with a bomb, but a gavel.”
David McNeill is a Tokyo-based journalist who teaches at Sophia
University. A Japan Focus coordinator, he is a regular contributor
to the London Independent and a columnist for OhMy News. He wrote
this article for Japan Focus.
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