Court orders state to disclose Okinawa reversion papers+

TOKYO, April 9 Kyodo -
The Tokyo District Court ordered the state Friday to disclose diplomatic
documents on the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan from U.S. control in ruling
on a lawsuit filed by 25 plaintiffs seeking the disclosure of three papers.
While they argued the papers show the existence of a bilateral secret pact over
the financing of the reversion, the court recognized it, with Presiding Judge
Norihiko Sugihara saying the documents indicate Japan agreed with the United
States (on the cost burdens for the reversion) without informing the Japanese
people of it.
''As the Japanese government did not want people to have impression that it had
bought back Okinawa, it needed to conceal the process'' to conclude the
agreement from the public eyes, the ruling said.
The suit was filed in March last year after the state rejected requests from 63
people, including the plaintiffs, to disclose the documents that were
declassified in the United States in the early 2000s, saying it did not have
them.
In addition to nullifying the state's decision not to disclose the documents,
Sugihara accepted the plaintiffs' demand that the state pay 100,000 yen to each
of them as their right to know had been damaged by the state's decision.
''It is apparent that the plaintiffs aimed to change the government's stance of
denying the existence of the secret pact and achieve the right to know in a
democratic nation (through the information disclosure request),'' Sugihara
said.
''But the foreign minister did not change the conventional stance that neither
the secret pact nor the documents corroborating it exist, without implementing
a sufficient probe,'' he said.
The Foreign Ministry's handling of the case ''should be recognized as insincere
as it made light of public expectations and it can easily be imagined that the
plaintiffs felt disappointment and anger,'' the presiding judge added.
During the trial, the government had claimed that the papers were not in its
possession, saying they may have been discarded, but Sugihara said the court
cannot accept the argument, citing the state's failure to conduct a sufficient
probe into their existence and offer a concrete account of how they were lost.
He said in the ruling that while it was the plaintiffs' responsibility to prove
the state had compiled and possessed the documents, it was the state's
responsibility to prove that it had lost them.
Unless the state proved the documents were abandoned, ''it should be
effectively assumed that the state still possesses them,'' Sugihara determined.
Ikuko Komachiya, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said, ''I
expect the decision to serve as a precedent for lawsuits seeking information
disclosure'' as it eased the plaintiffs' duty in presenting evidence.
Commenting on the ruling, Keiichi Katsura, who leads the plaintiffs, said,
''It's a perfect win. It will carry forward our right to know.''
The lawyers for the plaintiffs issued a statement that said, ''The bilateral
secret pact to finance the Okinawa reversion is closely related to the current
situation in Okinawa'' where the bulk of U.S. military bases in Japan are
located.
''We expect this ruling to provide an opportunity to reexamine the Japan-U.S.
Security Treaty and U.S. bases in Japan, and seek how Japan can achieve
peace,'' the lawyers said.
The plaintiffs include former Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takichi Nishiyama, 78,
who was convicted in the 1970s for his reporting on the reversion of Okinawa
and whose court case to restore his reputation was thrown out by the Supreme
Court in 2008.
''It's a revolutionary ruling,'' Nishiyama said. ''I hope it will lead to
further developing information disclosure in Japan and Japanese democracy.''
The papers in question, compiled between 1969 and 1971, include one indicating
Japan secretly shouldered $4 million in costs that the United States was
supposed to pay to restore farmland in Okinawa that had been used by U.S.
forces.
The diplomatic documents have ''primary historic value'' that show how the
government broke the impasse over the Okinawa reversion, Sugihara, the
presiding judge, said.
The suit attracted considerable attention when a former high-ranking Foreign
Ministry negotiator, Bunroku Yoshino, 91, testified in court in December that
he had initialed one of the documents, admitting to the existence of the secret
bilateral agreement.
In March, a Foreign Ministry panel looked into four alleged bilateral secret
pacts on nuclear weapons and other issues, and recognized three, including one
on the cost burdens for the reversion, as secretly reached agreements.
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada indicated the government could appeal
the ruling. ''I don't think (the government) will accept this (the ruling) as
it is,'' he told a press conference.
==Kyodo
2010-04-09 23:36:58


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