A 2016 essay criticizing a Japanese court ruling that overturned national policy based on a petition by a tiny minority, exposing the dangers of judicial moralism, media influence, and institutional imbalance.

2016-03-10

As readers know, I have written about the “two percent bad actors” theory.

In Japan, crimes such as so-called “ore-ore fraud” are incessant, many of which involve organized crime groups whose members are overwhelmingly composed of resident Koreans in Japan.

But does the Japanese judiciary punish them severely? Almost everyone who has directly confronted their wrongdoing would answer no. The situation in which the worst offenders sleep soundly is not limited to international society; it exists unmistakably within Japan’s legal profession as well.

And yet, judges like the one at the Otsu District Court in this case, with minds in which pseudo-moralism formed by reading the Asahi Shimbun is tangled together with Marxism, treat Kansai Electric Power—an organization that has worked tirelessly day and night for the public good, and could hardly be denied the status of a public-interest corporation—as if it were a criminal, ordering the immediate shutdown of nuclear power plants.

They do this by accepting as legitimate a petition filed by just twenty-nine individuals of dubious background—simply put, a so-called minority of citizens holding communist-like views—and by overturning the certification of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, which, after an enormous expenditure of time and vast national resources, had scrutinized Japan’s nuclear facilities to the highest level in the world. There is not a single country anywhere on earth where South Korea or China has reached such a level.

A single judge, a complete outsider to the field, overturns that determination.

This situation is no different from so-called civic groups who go to the United Nations to accuse Japan of rampant hate speech, based on the shouting of unidentified individuals—unknown to any Japanese citizen—wielding loudspeakers in front of former comfort women memorials or Korean schools, individuals who appear no different from yakuza masquerading as right-wingers and are highly likely to be resident Koreans in Japan. These groups are supported by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the Asahi Shimbun, and so-called cultural figures who sympathize with them—allowing a single individual to casually overturn national policy.

There are lawyers who praise this as a “brave ruling.”

They are the true threat to national security.

The word “traitor” exists precisely to describe people like them.