Japan’s Diet Enacts Secondary Capital Bill after Showdown

Tokyo, July 24 (Jiji Press)–The Diet, Japan’s parliament, enacted Friday night a bill to create a secondary capital of the country, after a last-minute showdown between the ruling and opposition camps a day before the end of the extended current Diet session. At a plenary meeting, the House of Councillors, the upper Diet chamber, passed the bill with 123 votes in favor and 121 against. Support came mainly from the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japan Innovation Party, while major opposition parties voted against the legislation to establish a secondary capital that would assume core national administrative functions in the event of a major disaster affecting Tokyo, the country’s capital. The bill, submitted to the Diet by the ruling parties, cleared the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, last week. Its enactment effectively drew the curtain on the Diet session, officially scheduled to end Saturday. The session, originally slated to end July 17, was extended for eight days as the LDP-led ruling bloc was determined to enact it. On Friday, the LDP and the JIP initially planned to hold a vote on the bill at a relevant Upper House special committee after a question-and-answer session at the panel in the morning. But the vote was put on hold due to pushback from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the biggest opposition party in the chamber, and others in the opposition camp. Proceedings at the special committee were suspended following the development and resumed in the evening. CDP parliamentary affairs chief Yoshitaka Saito and Yoshihiko Isozaki, the LDP’s Diet affairs head in the Upper House, intermittently held talks. On behalf of six opposition parties in the Upper House, Saito urged the LDP to make sure that a ban on holding a regional referendum on establishing special wards and a related local election simultaneously is clarified in a Diet testimony and a supplementary resolution. The LDP eventually accepted the opposition demand, leading the CDP to allow the committee vote on the secondary capital bill. The ruling side withdrew a special committee testimony tolerating a special wards referendum being held at the same time as a related local election. Then the bill cleared the special committee and was sent to the full Upper House. The committee also passed a supplementary resolution stipulating that maximum coordination should be made to prevent a local referendum and a related election from coinciding. The parliamentary confusion over the bill resulted in a delay in the start of the Upper House plenary meeting from 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. An intensive debate at the Lower House Budget Committee scheduled for Friday afternoon with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in attendance was pushed back to Monday morning, after the end of the current parliamentary session. In Friday’s Upper House special committee deliberations, the opposition side urged the ruling bloc to show cost estimates for creating a secondary capital. LDP lawmaker Kazuo Yana said that costs of establishing backup administrative functions “are estimated to range from billions of yen to tens of billions of yen,” based on past disaster-response hub projects. But he did not mention overall costs including those on transportation and communications infrastructure. JIP leader Hirofumi Yoshimura, also governor of the western Japan prefecture of Osaka, is seeking to have Osaka designated as the secondary capital and hold a related local referendum simultaneously with next spring’s gubernatorial election in the prefecture. “We should aim to hold the two polls on the same date,” Yoshimura told reporters after the enactment of the secondary capital bill. A bill submitted jointly by the Democratic Party for the People and Komeito, both opposition parties, to bar a local referendum from being held simultaneously with a related local election was voted down at the Upper House. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]