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Sumitaka Matsuuchi, a lieutenant commander in the Maritime Self-Defense Force, was apprehended last week for allegedly violating the Secrets Protection Law, which is based on the Japan-U.S. Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement signed in 1954. He has reportedly admitted to leaking confidential information, including secret data on the U.S. Aegis missile defense system.
The Aegis system aboard military ships is the core defense against ballistic missile attacks. Japan operates five Aegis-equipped ships, while the U.S. Navy dispatched five similar ships around Japan following the North Korean missile tests last year.
According to police reports the Chinese woman, who is the wife of a Japanese second-class petty naval officer, was investigated in January this year on suspicion of violating the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. At the couples' home, police found a hard disk containing information on the Aegis defense system-equipped vessels.
After the petty officer admitted receiving and forwarding the information, police traced it back to several officers, including teachers at an MSDF school. The trail eventually led to the source of the leak, Matsuuchi, who was engaged at the time of the offense in programming tasks including the Aegis system.
Matsuuchi is reported to have given a compact disc containing the secret data to an instructor at the naval school in Hiroshima prefecture around 2002 in response to the instructor's request for "learning materials."
Thus the Aegis' shield was broken loose. So loose, indeed, that the information could have been distributed to other teachers and students of the school. Police have conducted inquiries with over 100 individuals within the naval forces.
The magnitude of the leak and the lax information security is another blow to the Defense Ministry, which is currently under parliamentary scrutiny and police investigation over a defense-related contracts scandal involving its highest former civilian official.
The top commander of the U.S. forces in Japan, Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, publicly pointed out in June that the leak incident was a grave security concern. On Japan's part, Fumio Kyuma, then defense minister, apologized to his counterpart Robert Gates during his visit to Washington, D.C. in April.
The current defense minister, Shigeru Ishiba, who is known to be one of the best acquainted with and committed to security matters among successive heads of Japan's defense regime, pledged to thoroughly implement countermeasures.
Serious damage has already been done, adding to difficulties in resolving unsettled cases between Japan and the United States. Japan is not fully open to U.S. beef products; the Japanese government has yet to clear the plot for a new U.S. air base in Okinawa owing to local complaints; Japan's naval mission in the Indian Ocean as part of the war on terror in Afghanistan was suspended on Nov. 1, when the Japanese law that authorized the action expired; Japan is nervous about a possible U.S. removal of North Korea from its list of terrorism-sponsoring nations before the issue of Japanese citizens abducted to North Korea is resolved.
Traditionally, Japanese politicians have argued about their reliance on the United States and questioned U.S. readiness to actually come forward and defend Japan in case of an imminent threat. Now it's the United States that has to ponder the strength of its alliance with Japan in the face of cracks in military information security.
