On May 14, 1999, the long-awaited Administrative Information Disclosure Law (hereafter "AIDL") was enacted in Japan. The Appendix stipulates that the law is to come in effect within two years. This paper aims to briefly introduce its historical background and review its content.

1. Beginning with Sweden's Press Freedom Law and especially after enactment of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, information disclosure laws have been enacted in most developed countries, for example: Denmark, Norway (1970), France, Netherlands (1978), Austria, Canada, New Zealand (1982), Austria (1987), Belgium (1994), Korea (1996), Ireland (1998).

Although it took a long time to be enacted as a national law, discussions on an Information Disclosure Law in Japan began in the early 1970s. The key phrase that determined the discussion was "right to know". Hata explains the concept as follows:

This view, which stresses the importance of taking the recipient side of the communication flow into consideration, gained consensus among constitutional scholars as a principle. The Supreme Court also mentions the "right to know" in some decisions. For example, the Hakata Station Film Case decision points out that "in a democratic society the reports of the mass media provide the people with important materials on which to base their judgements as they participate in the nation's politics, and they serve the people's right to know" (Cf. Itoh/Beer 1978, 246-250(248)). In this case, the legality of the lower court’s order to present a part of a news film for evidential use was in