Politics of peace

Toshiyuki Obora is an unlikely threat to society. Bespectacled and soft-spoken, the 47- year-old has spent much of his adult life working as a cook in a Tokyo school and preaching pacifism on his days off. In 2004, however, he was arrested by Japanese police, interrogated and held in detention for 75 days. 'I thought it would never end,' he said.

The police confiscated his belongings and called his workplace, which then forced him to take 10 months' leave and a 60 per cent pay cut. Prosecutors demanded a six-month prison term. When a district court threw the charge out, the state spent thousands of hours and millions of yen challenging the decision and fighting it in the Tokyo High Court.

Obora's crime was handing out pamphlets to members of Japan's Self-Defence Forces (SDF) suggesting they 'think deeply' about their decision to support a costly and illegal war. The flier, distributed around an SDF housing complex in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, asked rhetorically: 'Would George Bush or Junichiro Koizumi go to fight a war in Iraq?' Japanese pacifists have been alarmed by the SDF dispatch to Iraq, which they believe is a prelude to ending Tokyo's 60-year pacifist stance.

Political pamphleteering is one of the oldest forms of modern political activity but the High Court decided last December that the danger it posed to SDF members required a conviction for trespassing and a fine of 100,000 yen ($6,500). Obora and his two co-defendants Nobuhiro Onishi and Sachimi Takada, who are challenging the conviction, were stunned. 'This is like delivering the final blow to Japan's democracy,' said Takada.

'Is that an overreaction? This case is crucial,' said Lawrence Repeta, a faculty member of Tokyo's Omiya Law School, who says the three were exercising 'the most traditional means' of free expression. 'The government must carry a very heavy burden to justify a restriction on people expressing their opinions on an important matter of public policy in this fashion. And in my view they have shown nothing at all to justify their actions.'

Professor Repeta and others say the arrest and conviction of the so-called 'Tachikawa Three' points to a co-ordinated campaign by the authorities to intimidate Japan's dwindling ranks of pacifists, as the government moves to shed the post-war political architecture that has kept Japan out of conflict since the second world war.