Arab News Japan

TOKYO: The Japan-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center on Tuesday accused the Japanese government of failing to properly utilize the Public Comment system to exclude opinions that it doesn’t want to address.

The CNIC stated: “Members of parliament are supposed to be the representatives of the people, but they refuse to interact with the people. They are supposed to be the people in charge of politics, but they reject political appeals from the people. We wonder if somehow the government and members of parliament consider social movements to be their enemies.”

The Public Comment system is a procedure that was legislated by the Amendments to the Administrative Procedure Act in June 2005 with the aim of ensuring the transparency of administrative management and soliciting a range of opinions from the general public.

The CNIC reports that the government is concerned about the surge in the number of public comments, including some seemingly generated by AI. It adds that the number of submissions increases in cases where the government is trying to promote policies that are of high public interest and controversial, such as its nuclear policy and the recycling of soil that contains radioactive material.

The CNIC also says that “informal contact with stakeholders and coordination during the draft formulation phase are the factors behind the low revision rate of the draft at the public comment phase.” As a result, it says, the reflection of opinions from public comments in the final policies has remained only superficial.

It cites as an example the government’s Seventh Strategic Energy Plan in which the phrase “reduce dependency on nuclear power as much as possible” was deleted and changed to “sustainably utilize [nuclear power] to the scale necessary”. The CNIC says the government admitted that the reason for this change was made at the request of the nuclear industry and local governments that host nuclear power plants.

“If the voices of the stakeholders heard during the process of policy formulation are prioritized while citizen participation at the final stage is disregarded, it is not surprising that voices doubting the purpose of public comment were raised by both the implementers and the public,” CNIC said, adding that the Public Comment Procedure should be one of the fundamental tools protecting the rights of the people.