No spies in Japan?

Press, 2 August 1985, Page 16

No spies in Japan?

From ‘The Economist,’ London.

Mr Konstantin Preobrazhensky was a correspondent in Tokyo for the Russian news agency Tass until Japanese police summoned him for questioning. He took the hint and skipped the country on July 16. Yet even if he had been arrested he could not have been charged with spying; nor could his contacts. Spying is not a crime in Japan. He would have been charged only with intimidating a Chinese man he was using to get information. In 1982 a Russian defector, Mr Stanislav Levchenko, who also posed as a reporter in Tokyo, described Japan as the world’s easiest country for spies. Under its constitution Japan does not have an army. Its “selfdefence force” may look like an army but constitutionally it is a police force. So, the legal argument goes, Japan has no military secrets, and ergo nobody

will bother to spy. The opposite is, of course, the truth. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has for years been talking about bringing in an anti-espionage law, and at last such a law has been submitted to the upper house of Parliament. It has a difficult path ahead. Its critics say it is too tough. Under it, a spy could be put to death. Spy-hunting is, anyway, a sensitive issue because of pacifism and because of the gruesome activities before 1945 of the Kempeitai, the secret police. In 1947 antiespionage clauses were deleted from the country’s criminal code. A law passed in 1954 protects classified information about American forces in Japan. Civil servants (including Japanese soldiers) are barred from disclosing official information; but the maximum penalty for doing so is a year’s imprisonment. Copyright — The Economist.