Deliberations on a set of bills related to digital reform are currently underway in the House of Councillors. However, issues that emerged during deliberations in the House of Representatives remain unresolved.
The focus will be whether discussions in the upper house will be able to make progress toward the establishment of a government agency in charge of accelerating digitization of administrative procedures and related future policies.
During the upper house plenary session on Wednesday, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga explained the purpose of five bills on digital reform, a signature policy of his administration, stressing that the bills are intended to "realize a digital society, comparable to other counties, in which anyone can enjoy the benefits of digitization to the fullest."
The digital agency is aimed at resolving a lag in the digitization of administrative services that has become apparent amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Suga expressed a strong desire for the agency to serve as a control tower that can "maintain important systems on its own and establish a framework to respond appropriately to system failures."
The five related bills, including the bill to establish the agency, comprise 63 proposals to create new laws and revise existing ones. The deliberations will involve a wide range of issues.
Opposition parties have called for thorough discussions in the upper house as deliberations in the lower house lasted only about 27 hours, shorter than past deliberations for important bills.
One of the reasons for the lower house not engaging in thorough deliberations was that opposition parties focused on the problem of errors in relevant materials that had been submitted to the Diet. A lot of time was also spent over the issue regarding the messaging app LINE, whose users' personal information was accessible by an affiliated company in China.
The largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, supports efforts to promote digitization, and it agreed with the bill to establish the agency in the lower house. The party's questions tend to lean toward the issue of protecting personal information.
"Wouldn't it be possible for the Prime Minister's Office to siphon off information collected by the digital agency?" CDPJ member Hideya Sugio asked.
"The concern is not justified," Suga said. "The government will work to dispel concerns by creating a system that allows people to amend the personal information on record or request the suspension of its use."
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