PS COLUMN　ARCHIVE

May 28, 2008

My thought on the enacted bill of The Basic Space Law

The law called “Basic Space Law” was established on last May 21. The law literally determines the basic policy of the space development of Japan and supposed to act as a guideline for the space activity of future Japan. The law, however, involves big questions therein, as pointed out in the YM column by Dr. YM last week. The biggest problem is, as said by Dr. YM, that the law legally allows Japan to use space for military purpose. So far, space development of Japan was clearly specified for limited use of peaceful purpose only, and now the revised law was changed to, “Space development should be carried out in the interests of maintaining peace for international community and of securing international safety as well as our country’s national security” as is provided for in the article three. The article two stipulates, “Space development should be carried out on the basis of pacifist principles of the Constitution of Japan”, which may be understood as deterrent to military use of space; nevertheless there is undeniably a greater risk to turn to dangerous situation as pointed out by Dr. YM.

The enactment of the law may inevitably cause an arousal of reviewing structural system of JAXA. It is as clear as day that if JAXA’s space development is reorganized to have a new function of serving national security, then it will undoubtedly bring distortion to the science divisions, because science can be only developed through open and transparent discussion, while information on national security is necessarily only to be shared among limited number of staffs. For avoiding such an inconvenience, two independent space organizations are by all means necessary like NASA and Department of Defense in the USA.

Upper and Lower Houses in all only had several hours for tabling such an important bill to pass into the law. Of course, the content of the law is questionable, so is its deliberation process to the enactment. The Diet passed such an obviously strange bill of health-care system for the latter-stage elderly so controversially argued among mass media of newspapers and TV networks, which may prove that we, citizens of this country, are all felt taken for granted by the Administration.

How could we hold back such an absurd bill becoming the law? I sometimes say to myself, “Why couldn’t I, who had been more or less engaged in space development, exert some kind of influence against the enactment of the law?” On the other hand, I think it was extremely difficult for working-level scientist like me to intervene in such a highly political process of legal enactment like the law in question. What we can, after all, possibly do for maximum efficiency from now might be two things; the first is to send the best and the brightest human resource to the legislative body and the second is to carefully monitor how the enacted law will be enforced.

The Basic Space Law is the basic law; therefore I suppose there will be implemented detailed rules and measures for practical enforcement of the law. We must carefully observe how the government is going to enforce the law, and if we were to find any kind of question, we should raise our voices against such an enforcement of the law.

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