Conservative forces are on the rise in Japan, threatening its commitment to peace and democracy.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a landslide victory in the upper house parliamentary elections last July against a backdrop of deteriorating media freedom. Gaining a two-thirds majority enabled Abe to achieve his long-held ambition to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution (despite polls suggesting that the existing war-renouncing constitution is supported by two-thirds of Japanese voters).
Incidents of harassment, intimidation and censorship have increased since Abe returned to power in 2012. This year, three TV journalists known to be out of favour with the Abe administration left their posts. Their dismissal came just weeks after communications minister Sanae Takaichi declared that the government could shut down TV broadcasters that it deemed politically biased.
Abe has changed the legal framework in which the media must operate with the 2014 Secrecy Act, which lends the state greater power to withhold information and to punish journalists working with government whistleblowers.
His administration now has the foreign media in its sights. Carsen Germis, the Tokyo correspondent for Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2010-15, claims that government officials refuse to speak to foreign reporters because they ask uncomfortable questions about policies on economics, nuclear energy and plans for constitutional reform. Critical correspondents now understand that they risk being labelled as Japan-bashers and blacklisted by Abe’s press handlers if they question his policies.
In the past six years, Japan has slid from 11th to 72nd place out of 180 in the Reporters Sans Frontières press freedom index. As Japan prepares to discuss the future of its constitution, it seems increasingly unlikely that the debate will be free or fair.
