Japan’s ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has approved a bill that will make it illegal to desecrate the national flag — known as the “Hinomaru”. When the bill is passed, anyone caught in the act, or documenting someone else doing so, could face a two-year prison sentence or a 200,000 yen fine. The LDP hopes to enact the bill in the current parliamentary session ending 17 July.

The most common reaction to this proposal from critics has been confusion. The official opposition Democratic Party for the People (DDP) has said it will vote against. This is not because the party is in favour of desecrating the national flag, but because it sees the legislation as a waste of time, and is worried about the impact on freedom of expression.

It’s certainly hard to make a case for the bill’s urgency. It is not as if there have been many — or indeed any — high-profile cases of flag desecration in Japan that might have prompted the legislation. Furthermore, it has taken up a great deal of time because the wording of the bill has been agonised over to a farcical extent. Exemptions had to be included to ensure that football supporters customising their flags or teachers serving school children rice balls decorated with the Hinomaru don’t fall foul of the law.

The Government argues it is merely correcting a mildly embarrassing anomaly. Some countries restrict flag desecration only in relation to their own national flag, such as the United States and France, while others extend protection to all flags, including foreign ones, as in South Korea and Germany. Japan, however, has ended up in a position where it is legal to desecrate the Japanese flag but illegal to desecrate those of other countries.

Yet the time and political effort devoted to the issue suggest it may amount to more than a simple tidying-up exercise. One interpretation is that it serves as a distraction for a government that lacks either the means or the ideas to address more serious problems, from rising inflation to public concerns over immigration.

The law might also be an olive branch to the hardline conservatives whose true goal is rewriting the pacifist constitution — a far bigger task. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has described the bill as “necessary to protect Japan’s honour”, but cynics might argue it is really to ward off criticism from her Right flank. Tellingly perhaps, the idea of a desecration bill seems to have come from the ascendant Sanseitō party, whose relationship to the LDP is similar to that of Reform to the Tories in the UK.

There is an international dimension, too, that makes the bill attractive to Takaichi. The bill might have little practical use, but it could serve as a coded rebuke aimed at a foreign audience, namely China. The Justice Ministry gave a hint of this when it described the project of formulating the law as “in consideration of the smooth functioning and security of Japan’s diplomatic relations”. This may be a reference to the documented cases of Japanese flag burning in China that followed Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2023. The protests led to an ongoing ban on Japanese seafood.

This touches on a broader issue: Takaichi has a China problem. Her biggest controversy to date was her comments in November of last year that implied Japan would militarily intervene if China invaded Taiwan, which provoked a volcanic response from Beijing. President Trump urged Takaichi to walk it back, which she refused to do. The flag law might then be, at least to some extent, a show of seriousness, and a signal, or even a warning, that Japanese flags are not for burning and the country is a serious international player, not to be messed with.

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Philip Patrick is a lecturer at a Tokyo university and a freelance journalist.

@Pbp19Philip

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