Apr 9 07:47 AM US/Eastern
TOKYO, April 9 (AP) - (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 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.
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