Japan's Forward Flight - NYTimes.com TOKYO - Last month the Diet passed the so-called Special Secrets Protection Bill. The law does not define what a "special secret" is, but whoever leaks one may be imprisoned for up to 10 years. A journalist who merely tries to obtain information the government views as sensitive could be sentenced to five years in jail. The law, which was proposed by the cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe only in August, has been widely criticized in Japan and abroad, sparking large protests in Tokyo. Many of its opponents have noted that it recalls the infamous Peace Preservation Act of 1925, which the imperial government used to suppress dissent through World War II. The comparison is apt in more than one way. The Peace Preservation Act was passed when Japan was still reeling from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which had left Tokyo in ruins. Today, the country is still reeling from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, and the ensuing nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Immediately after the secrets law was passed, people observed on Twitter and other social media that the Abe administration's move was a version of what Naomi Klein calls the "shock doctrine": the practice among politicians and corporations of exploiting the fear and disorientation that follow natural disasters and other major "shocks" to push through controversial policies - giving a second, supposedly therapeutic shock to the system. This, too, seems like a fairly accurate appraisal. At the same time, the secrecy bill is far from the only "shocking" news item to have surfaced in Japan since the triple disasters of 2011. Ever since then the Japanese government has provided the media with a steady diet of major, almost all-consuming issues, and the media have obligingly lurched from one to the next. From May to August 2011, news coverage focused on the efforts of members of Prime Minister Naoto Kan's party to force him out of office after he ordered the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in Hamaoka. The rest of the year was dominated by news of the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station at Futenma, on Okinawa. During the first half of 2012 the big issue was Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's push to pass an unexpected increase in the sales tax. By August 2012, it was tensions between Japan and South Korea after President Lee Myung-bak's visit to islands that both countries claim as their own. The following month, relations with China soured, when the Japanese government announced its intention to purchase contested islands. And it hasn't stopped: Just the other day, Mr. Abe created another crisis by visiting Yasukuni Shrine, becoming the first sitting prime minister to do so since 2006. The adoption of the special secrets bill, in other words, is merely one in a series of supposedly pressing issues that have dominated national discourse in Japan. I say "supposedly pressing" because there was, in fact, no compelling reason for the government or the media to give these issues such prominence when they did. The sales tax could have been raised later. The territorial dispute with China could have been kept under wraps. No urgent matter of national security made it necessary to railroad the special secrets law through Parliament. Meanwhile, the one problem that can't wait is being pushed into the background. Nearly three years have passed since the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear accident, and almost 280,000 evacuees from the contaminated areas of Fukushima - about 60 percent of the original number - are still living in temporary housing. Little progress has been made toward decommissioning units 1 through 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant; they continue to produce 400 tons of contaminated water every day, some of which is flowing into the sea. The government's first priority should be to clean up the nuclear contamination and present Japanese voters with a long-term energy strategy and new economic vision. Anyone can see that these are the truly pressing issues - anyone, that is, who isn't looking away. In this sense, describing what has been happening in Japan since 2011 as a version of Ms. Klein's shock doctrine is only half right. The Japanese government - first the Democratic Party of Japan, now the Liberal Democratic Party - may have been exploiting people's fears and disorientation to push through unpopular policies, but the media and society as a whole have been collaborating with it, even if unconsciously. The French call this "la fuite en avant," or the forward flight. Fleeing forward is what you are doing when you plunge from one issue to the next, constantly creating new emergencies in order to avoid confronting a more serious and intractable problem. It is what Japan is doing when it averts its eyes from the possibility that, as some have speculated, it may take 20 years and 200 trillion yen to recover fully from the damage of 2011. Or maybe the recovery will take more time and more money. No one really knows, because the Japanese government has yet to release official estimates. It just keeps fleeing forward, with the media and society close behind. Norihiro Kato is a literary scholar and a professor at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.