Selected Columns

"This is one major result of Japan's regime change." So said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano on March 9, taking obvious pride in the public release that day of Foreign Ministry documents detailing secret pacts between Japan and the United States -- pacts long denied by the present government's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) predecessors.

After six months in power, this moment of victory for the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)-led administration was long in coming.

The agreements, however, are almost certainly not the only secrets hidden during the long-lived LDP-era triumvirate of politicians, bureaucrats and big business. Certainly the DPJ believed so when it was in opposition, though its many demands for materials and information were met by a solid wall of resistance. This policy of silence, established by the bureaucracy itself, could not be torn down despite the "regime change" that brought the DPJ into government. Even now, the top political figures in each ministry and agency fight in vain to uncover the secrets of their own charges.

When the DPJ-led government first sought to shave money from the budget requests compiled under the previous administration of Prime Minister Taro Aso, it directed the bureaucracy to make up a list of unnecessary programs. No real progress was made and some members of the Hatoyama Cabinet, unable to produce budget cuts, were referred to cynically as "ministers of making requests."

"The bureaucrats only reply to specific questions they are asked. They make no effort to be helpful by saying, 'We also have this information,'" the opposition-era DPJ complained -- grumbles still heard among the ministries' political leaders now that the DPJ is in power.

The same kind of relentless investigation that was used in tracking down wasteful spending and in uncovering the secret Japan-U.S. pacts must be applied across the board, or information will remain locked securely behind the doors of bureaucratic offices. In short, preparation has been insufficient to take on the whole bureaucratic edifice. Quick results have not been forthcoming, and nor can they be expected for such a difficult task.

For their part, the politicians also did not have the resolve to bring potentially inconvenient facts into public view.

Hirano himself, now so proud of the government's efforts at opening secrets to the public, played dumb when asked on Sept. 17 -- just a day after the DPJ assumed power -- about revealing details of the secret fund maintained by the Cabinet Secretariat. The fund -- which in recent years has stood at about 1.4 billion yen annually and, including monies provided by the Foreign Ministry, has been the source of billions of yen in untraceable spending -- has long been seen as a problem.

When in opposition, the DPJ submitted a bill to the Diet that would have forced the Cabinet Secretariat to release the fund's expense records to the public after 10 to 25 years. The DPJ, however, is now less enthusiastic about getting that information into the open. "We said that from the perspective of an opposition party," Hirano told reporters on Nov. 20 last year. "We now stand in government, and must consider national interests when we act." In other words, at the moment the DPJ gained power, it switched to the side of secrecy.

It is also strange that there are virtually no records kept of Cabinet meetings and gatherings, or of meetings of the ministries' top three officials -- the ministers, senior vice ministers and parliamentary secretaries. In an ironic twist, it is the bureaucracy that bemoans this lack of written records and transparency, with many worried that a dearth of documentation will make it difficult for future generations to reconstruct past events.

And so the ideal of transparency in government grows hazy, and the fresh start promised by the "regime change" last year goes by the wayside. (By Shigeyuki Tanaka, Political News Department)