Photo/Illutration Defense Ministry in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The Defense Ministry announced it had reprimanded five members of the Self-Defense Forces for having loose lips when discussing state secrets with colleagues.

It said April 26 that the individuals involved divulged matters to others within the SDF who did not have sufficient security clearance.

Ministry officials were at pains to point out that no state secrets were leaked outside the organization.

One instance concerned a lieutenant colonel in his 50s in the Ground SDF who oversaw a unit at the Northern Army based in Hokkaido.

He was accused of speaking out of turn about SDF activities during a military conflict when addressing 15 subordinates on July 16, 2023, who had not been assessed for the security clearance needed to handle state secrets under the Specially Designated Secrets Protection Law. The lieutenant colonel was giving instructions prior to a training exercise.

No report ever reached a higher unit because junior officers stepped in and instructed the 15 members not to mention what was said to anyone else.

Even so, a complaint was filed with the SDF’s military police against the lieutenant colonel.

The other case involved four Maritime SDF officers who apparently did not check the security clearance status of a lower-ranking member.

On June 20, 2022, an MSDF captain in his 40s who commanded the destroyer Inazuma designated a crew member who had not received security clearance to handle information about the tracking of ships on a monitor in the combat information center.

A lieutenant commander and lieutenant junior grade both in their 30s had failed to check on the security clearance of the younger MSDF member that is required at regular intervals.

The officer in his 40s who succeeded as commander of the Inazuma was also slow in confirming the security clearance status. His salary was cut for two months.

The other four were suspended from work for six days.

According to the Defense Ministry, this was the second time that an announcement has been made of SDF members violating the state secrets protection law. The previous occasion, in December 2022, involved an MSDF captain who was eventually fired. His case was referred to prosecutors.

Ten years have passed since the state secrets law was enacted.

In 2022, about 130,000 of the total of 230,000 SDF members had their security clearance assessed.

AN OUTSIDER’S VIEW

Mitsuru Fukuda, a professor of crisis management at Nihon University in Tokyo, said there were two sides to the latest cases.

He said that if the SDF officers knowingly talked about state secrets to unauthorized members, the only recourse was to more strenuously get them to understand their obligation to comply with the law.

But if they spoke without realizing they were in dangerous territory, Fukuda said it created a situation where more thorough education was needed. In such cases, he said the individuals need to be more aware of what constituted state secrets as well as who they were allowed to talk freely with.

A government source conceded that no system had been put in place to check whether the designation of state secrets was necessary or to oversee that those who required a security clearance had received it.

(This article was written by Daisuke Yajima, Nobuhiko Tajima and Yuko Kawasaki.)

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