Yokoyamacho comments

It sounds like some of you don't live in Japan, especially the "[s]everal other posters [who] have noted (albeit anecdotally) that they see or hear no one speaking out against the law. This seems a pretty clear sign that the law is not perceived as any sort of threat to democracy."

In fact, there have been editorials against the bill throughout the past month in the leading daily newspapers, there have been DAILY protests about the bill for at least 2 weeks prior to passage of the bill (I myself participated in one of the larger ones), and something like 2,000 academics -- including constitutional law scholars, media law scholars and others -- have presented petitions against the bill. So has the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the leading lawyers' organization in the country. All of them complain of how it is a threat to democracy, and some even bring up how it will return Japan to the 1930s police state.

As for this law being "what the voters want," nothing permits that inference. Opinion polls are against the bill. The LDP and New Komeito together had only 42% of the votes cast in the 2012 Lower House election, but because of the peculiarities of the proportional representation system -- whose mathematics are entirely under the Diet's control, not the voters' or an independent authority's -- they got 66.4% of the seats. In terms of the percentage of eligible voters, this was about 25% of the electorate. Before you blame citizens for their own apathy, reflect that in order to run for Diet here, you have to put up $30,000 and quit your job. Compare that to $100 if you want to run for Congress from Maryland, or about $1,700 from California, or £750 (about $1,200) if you want to run for Parliament in the UK. Only rich people can run -- there aren't any Jimmy Stewarts in the Diet (unless they're like Jimmy Stewart the rich actor, instead of the characters he played).

As for reading the constitution (Kempou), nice try, but the Japan Supreme Court doesn't do that. The Kempou states that any law or act of the State that is unconstitutional is invalid -- but the Supremes have declared 10 elections unconstitutional (because of flaws in the election law) without invalidating them. The 2012 election that brought Abe into power was even worse, because the election law hadn't been changed since the previous time it was ruled unconstitutional, but the Supremes let that one stand, too. Moreover, the Supremes have always upheld limitations on human rights enacted by the Diet.

I teach in a law faculty in Tokyo. I was pointing out to my students that due to the vagueness of the secrets law, the arrest of political dissidents could be designated as secrets for "anti-terrorism" reasons (or one of the additional reasons that the law leaves "TBD"), meaning that if you disappeared the police could stonewall your family and friends. This is of course what happened in Latin America during the 1970s. I thought I was extrapolating when I taught this, but a few days later, the #2 guy in the LDP, Ishiba Shigeru, wrote on his blog that demonstrating against the anti-secrecy law was terrorist activity.

Anyone who says that calling this bill a threat to democracy is histrionic is 180 degrees mistaken.