Few youngsters would follow Snowden’s lead in Japan
| Pages | 197-212 |
| Date | 14 August 2017 |
| Published date | 14 August 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-08-2016-0026 |
| Author | Kiyoshi Murata,Yasunori Fukuta,Yohko Orito,Andrew A. Adams |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology |
Few youngsters would follow
Snowden’s lead in Japan
Kiyoshi Murata and Yasunori Fukuta
School of Commerce, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
Yohko Orito
Faculty of Collaborative Regional Innovation, Ehime University,
Matsuyama, Japan, and
Andrew A. Adams
Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Purpose –This paper aims to deal with the attitudes towards and social impact of Edward Snowden’s
revelations in Japan, taking the Japanese socio-cultural and political environment surrounding privacy and
state surveillanceinto account.
Design/methodology/approach –A questionnaire survey of 1,820 university students and semi-
structured follow-up interviewswith 56 respondents were conducted, in addition to reviews of the literature
on privacy and state surveillance in Japan. The outcomes of the survey were statistically analysed, and
qualitativeanalyses of the interview results were also performed.
Findings –Snowden’s revelations have had little influence over Japanese youngsters’attitudes towards
privacy and state surveillance,mainly due to their low level of awareness of the revelations and high level of
confidencein government agencies.
Practical implications –The study results implya need for reviewing educationalprogrammes for civic
educationin lower and upper secondary education.
Social implications –The results of this study based ona large-scale questionnaire survey indicate an
urgent necessity for providingJapanese youngsters with opportunities to learn more about privacy, liberty,
individualautonomy and national security.
Originality/value –This study is the first attempt to investigate the social impact of Snowden’s
revelations on Japaneseyoungsters’attitudes towards privacy and statesurveillance as part of cross-cultural
analysesbetween eight countries.
Keywords Japan, Surveillance, Privacy, Social impact, Edward Snowden
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In June 2013, The Guardian in the UK and The Washington Post in the USA began
publishing internal electronic documents from the US’signals intelligence (SIGINT)
organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), provided to them by Edward Snowden
This study was supported by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and
Technology, Japan) Programme for Strategic Research Bases at Private Universities (2012-2016)
project “Organisational Information Ethics”S1291006 and the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (B) 15H03385, (B) 25285124 and (B) 24330127. Sixty-five academics from Universities
around Japan helped in encouraging their students to respond to our survey. There is no space to list
them here, but the authors extend their sincere thanks for those efforts.
Snowden’s
lead in Japan
197
Received 16 August 2016
Revised 23 March 2017
Accepted 23 March 2017
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.15 No. 3, 2017
pp. 197-212
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-08-2016-0026
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1477-996X.htm
who had obtained the documents whileemployed as a systems administrator at the NSA for
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.As they have done previously, the NSA and other parts of
the US Government generally will not confirm or deny the validity of the documents;
however, on 21 June 2013, theUS Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the
Espionage Act. The activitiesdetailed in the documents included activity undertaken by the
NSA and its main SIGINT partner the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), and with the SIGINT agencies of three former British colonies (Canada, Australia
and New Zealand), as well as joint activitieswith similar agencies in other countries such as
Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
In 2014, the Pew Research Center (Madden, 2014) undertook the first of a number of
surveys of US citizens’attitudes to Snowden and the documents he revealed. In particular,
they asked questions such as whetherrespondents believed that Snowden’s revelations had
served or harmed the public good, whether Snowden should be prosecuted or not. Inspired
by these surveys, a group of academics at Meiji University in Tokyo developed a pilot
survey deployed in Japan and Spainusing students as the primary research population (for
reasons of resource constraints)and conducted follow-up interviews. The resultsof this pilot
survey are presented in Murata et al. (2017). Havingrevised the survey after analysis, it was
deployed with the cooperation of local academics in Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and
Sweden (in English), and in translation in Japan and Germany. With the aid of graduate
students studying in Tokyo, it was also translated into Chinese and deployed in Taiwan
(using traditional Chinese characters) and the People’s Republic of China (using simplified
Chinese characters). The choice of countries was a combination of deliberation and
pragmatism. The following countries had suitable resources available: New Zealand was
chosen as a Five Eyes member; Germany, Spain and Sweden provide an EU perspective;
Mexico provides a US neighbouring perspective as well as a Spanish-influenced culture
outside Spain; and Japan, China and Taiwan provide a South East Asian viewpoint. This
paper presents the resultsof the survey in Japan.
1.1 Roadmap
This paper focusses on the local content of Snowden’s revelations in the rest of this
introduction section. In Section2, an overview is given of the general cultural and historical
context of government surveillance. Section 3 gives an overview of the survey and of
respondent’s demographicinformation, while Section 4 provides the detailed survey results.
Section 5 presents the politicaland cultural impacts of Snowden as perceived by the authors,
while the final section gives some conclusionsand identifies avenues for future research.
1.2 Snowden’s revelations and Japan
This study deals with the attitudes towards and social impact of Edward Snowden’s
revelations in Japan through a questionnaire survey and semi-structured follow-up
interviews, taking the Japanese socio-cultural and political environment surrounding
privacy and state surveillance into account. Although it is claimed that both his act of
revelations and the NSA’s indiscriminate mass surveillance programmes he exposed drew
worldwide attention, Japanese news media did not seem to acknowledge the
newsworthiness of the contents of his revelations and reported about them in relatively
smaller articles and less frequentlycompared with other countries. In general, the Japanese
mass media rarely report on surveillance issues, including state surveillance issues. This
behaviour may have been developed based on Japanese people’s tendencies to have a high
degree of general trust in their governments and to express little interest in political issues
JICES
15,3
198
To continue reading
Request your trial