TOKYO
Akira Nagatsuma, an opposition lawmaker who was once a reporter.
HE has a crusader’s intensity, rarely cracking a smile and dispensing with the politician’s need to win over a visitor. No, for Akira Nagatsuma, an opposition lawmaker who was once a reporter, the goal at hand was clear: breaking Japan’s one-party state by rooting out hidden information.
By chasing after tips he receives daily on his cellphone, prying secrets out of the all-powerful bureaucracy or going for the jugular in parliamentary debates, Mr. Nagatsuma, 48, has become the nation’s chief muckraker. He again grabbed front-page headlines recently by exposing the widespread practice among elite bureaucrats of using taxpayers’ money to take taxis home at night, and accepting drinks, gifts and even cash as kickbacks from drivers looking for repeat fares. The revelations surrounding the “pub taxis,” as they became known, made him an even more feared figure among bureaucrats. And they elevated his standing among voters who first heard of him last year when he uncovered widespread bureaucratic mishandling of the national pension records.
His dogged pursuit of the pension problems earned him the nickname Mr. Pension and helped his Democratic Party seize Parliament’s upper house last summer. Voter anger against the governing Liberal Democratic Party eventually led to the downfall of Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister, and to something that postwar Japan had never experienced: a divided Parliament.
Used to half a century of nearly continuous rule by the Liberal Democrats, Japanese voters remain uneasy with the present political situation, which the news media uniformly describe negatively as a “twisted Parliament.” And indeed, with no history of bipartisanship, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and his Liberal Democrats have struggled to pass even the most basic of laws. For the first time, they have had to deal with an opposition with real powers.
“I think that’s the best possible thing,” Mr. Nagatsuma said, “because we are getting closer to what basic democracy should be. Strictly speaking, democracy still hasn’t taken root in Japan.”
So Mr. Nagatsuma sees possibilities in the so-called twisted Parliament. The opposition’s control over the upper house has led to substantial debates over policy, though the governing party has used its grip over the more powerful lower house to ram through some legislation.
The change has also given his party’s committee chairmen in the upper house the legal authority to investigate the workings of government by summoning witnesses or demanding documents. Even though that power is seldom exercised and Mr. Nagatsuma himself is a member of the lower house, he said his party’s new standing has made bureaucrats more responsive to his demands for information, though not as responsive as he wished.
“Compared to before, they’re somewhat more willing to disclose information,” he said. “We’re talking of a change from 1 out of 10 times to 2 out of 10. I think that, for an advanced nation, that’s just unbelievable. No other country hides government documents the way Japan does.”
When he was reminded that a change from one to two times was double the previous rate, Mr. Nagatsuma smiled — the only time during an hourlong interview at his office.
WITH documents piled high on a chair, stored inside boxes on his desk and floor and bound in folders titled “pension,” the office had the cluttered look of a reporter’s workspace. Located inside one of the two buildings housing members of the lower house, it was tiny, like all the other offices, with an even tinier waiting room where his staff worked and guests waited.
Unlike their American counterparts, Japanese lawmakers do not have the office space, let alone the budget, to hire enough staff members for serious legislative work. They depend on bureaucrats within the various ministries to provide information, research issues, write speeches and, of course, draft bills.
As scholars of Japanese politics have long pointed out, that situation has created a cozy — and often collusive — relationship between bureaucrats and the Liberal Democrats. About 20 percent of the party’s lower-house legislators are former bureaucrats, a far higher percentage than in the opposition. In return, bureaucrats, who are supposed to be neutral public servants, have long favored the governing party and treated the opposition dismissively.
“If the bureaucracy is a horse,” Mr. Nagatsuma said, “politicians and the people are riding the horse without holding the reins. We’re just sitting on the horse and letting it decide the country’s direction.”
In a legislative body where a quarter of his colleagues inherited their seats from their fathers or relatives, Mr. Nagatsuma came to politics in a roundabout way. After college he joined NEC, the electronics giant, because he was inspired by the company’s project at the time to contribute to world peace by building a simultaneous language interpretation machine.
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