PUBLIC demonstrations in Japan are some of the free world’s most orderly and also some of the most heavily policed. On November 26th, as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) pushed a controversial secrecy bill through the lower house of the Diet, your correspondent walked by a line of protesters sitting calmly outside the building, holding signs against the proposed law. The nearest thing to violence was one middle-aged woman with a megaphone pumping a fist and chanting. That makes it stranger still that in a blog post on November 29th, three days after the lower house passed the bill, Shigeru Ishiba, the LDP’s secretary-general and the party’s number-two, compared the people protesting against the new law to terrorists. Some of the demonstrations have been sizeable—one, on November 21st in central Tokyo, numbered in the thousands, but many of the protesters that day were elderly and as their march reached the Diet buildings they lowered their banners in obedience to orders from the police. Nonetheless, “the tactic of merely screaming is in essence little different from acts of terrorism”, wrote Mr Ishiba on his blog. Amid a storm of criticism he quickly softened his stance. Noisy demonstrations alone, he clarified in a speech on December 1st, do not constitute terrorism.

Yet the damage is done. Not only is the ruling party’s illiberal attitude made plain, but Mr Ishiba’s comment only adds to worries about broad scope of the secrecy bill, which is expected to clear the upper house of parliament this week. It will hand out ten-year prison sentences to those who give away state secrets in four areas: in defence, diplomacy, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism. It is vaguely worded and there is little safeguard against the likelihood of too much information being secreted away from the public. “Thanks Mr Ishiba! Now we know how protesters against the powers-that-be will be treated once the secrecy bill passes,” tweeted Taro Yamamoto, an opposition politician. Mr Ishiba’s reaction also raises anew the question of whether the bill might in future be used to stop anti-nuclear protests against restarting Japan’s nuclear power plants—which the government regards as possible targets for terrorist attacks.

The main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, along with the Japan Restoration Party and five other parties all attacked Mr Ishiba’s comment, as “outrageous verbal abuse”. The definition of terrorism contained in the bill that passed, they noted, is too vague. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister and the main architect of the bill, which he says will strengthen national security, is already feeling the weight of the law’s unpopularity. The approval rate for his cabinet has fallen below 50% for the first time since he took office in December 2012, according to a poll published by the Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper, on December 1st. It now stands at 49%, down from 53% in the previous survey. Mr Ishiba’s comments will not help.

(Picture credit: AFP)