No. 108, April 1999

Full-Text Database of the Minutes of the Diet:
A vast source of information on Japan
to be available on the Net

Mika Shinohara*

CONTENTS

1. Facts about the Diet of Japan 
2. The Minutes of the Diet and their lack of accessibility 
3. Development in the retrieval of the Minutes of the Diet 
4. Full-text Database for the Minutes of the Diet 
5. Schedule for the future 

ABSTRACT

The Minutes of the Diet (Parliament of Japan) are a rich and precious source of information about Japan. Especially the Minutes of Standing Committee meetings, which record proceedings of a session in question-and-answer style - questions put by the Diet Members and the answer given by Ministers of State and government officials - provide various kinds of information on the political, economic and social issues which Japan faces.

Up to now access to this information source has been very limited. The National Diet Library (NDL) sends the Minutes of the Diet to prefectural assembly libraries and to some national libraries abroad. The NDL also compiles and publishes an index to the Minutes both in book form and as a database. The NDL is, in fact, the only institution that keeps the complete set of the Minutes and offers them for public access.

A full-text database of the Minutes of the Diet, which has just been developed jointly by the NDL, the Secretariat of the House of Representatives and the Secretariat of the House of Coucillors, will soon make public the Minutes and thus provide the people of Japan with an opportunity to get to know the political process and get involved in it, and at the same time provide the people of the world with direct and accurate information about Japan.

The Retrieval System, a subsystem of the Full-Text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet, enables users to search the contents of the Minutes by keyword, name of speaker, title of speaker, date, house, committee and so on speedily, and display, edit and print out or download the text. The system is scheduled to be open to public access through the Internet in January 1999. Although the coverage of data is at present limited to recent sessions of the Plenary and Budget Committee meetings, it will be expanded to all Committees in April 1999 and back sessions (from 1947) by the end of FY 2002.

1. Facts about the Diet of Japan

The Diet (Parliament of Japan) is specified in the Constitution of 1946 as the highest organ of state power and the sole law-making organ of the state (Article 41). It is composed of two houses, namely, the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors. The members of both houses are publicly elected representatives of the people.

A session of the Diet may be ordinary, extraordinary or special according the reason for its convening. An ordinary session begins January every year for the period of 150 days. An extraordinary session is convened when necessary, and a special session is held after a general election of the House of Representatives. All sessions are given a sequential number regardless of kind, for instance, the present session is the 143rd.

The final decision of each House is made by its Plenary meeting. However, the most important law-making and oversight functions of the Diet are carried out by various committees of the Houses. The number and names of the standing committees are specified in the Diet Law. A special committee may be set up to deal with a specific matter by a decision of either House. At present there are 20 standing committees in the House of Representatives and 17 in the House of Councillors. Investigation committees are also set up in the House of Councillors to conduct long-term and comprehensive research.

In each committee, the deliberations are carried out in Q and A style: questions are asked by the members of the committee and are answered by Ministers of State or government officials. The topics and subjects for deliberation range from legal, political, diplomatic or economic, financial, industrial, agricultural and communication affairs, to scientific, educational, cultural, welfare, labor and other social affairs, or natural disasters, accidents, scandals and crimes, covering almost all the issues which Japan faces. In particular, the Budget Committee not only examines the budget proposed by the Cabinet but also takes up a wide variety of key policy questions, and this committee is regarded as the most important.

Each House has its own Secretariat, Research Offices of the Committees and a Legislative Bureau. The National Diet Library (NDL) is an organization within the legislative branch of the government which provides the Diet - Houses, Committees and Members - with information and research services, and which is independent of the Secretariats of the Houses. The Library also has the function of the national, deposit library of Japan.  In the Library, the Research and Legislative Reference Bureau has special responsibility in services for the Diet.

2. The Minutes of the Diet and their lack of accessibility

The deliberations of the Diet, especially in the committees, are a valuable information source about major topics in Japan and the record of proceedings can be relied on as a precise and comprehensive means of grasping the contents of the deliberations, though some of the Diet deliberations on hot issues are made public through TV and other mass media.

Article 57 of the Constitution of Japan stipulates:"Deliberation in each House shall be public,.... Each House shall keep a record of proceedings. This record shall be published and given general circulation, excepting such parts of proceedings of secret session as may be deemed to require secrecy." While the provision of the Constitution is interpreted as the requirement for Plenary meetings, the Rules of each House also demand records of deliberations in the committees should be compiled, and we usually describe both of them as the Minutes of the Diet.

Compilation of the Minutes of the Diet is mainly the responsibility of the Records Department of the Secretariat of each House. The Proceedings Department and Committees Department also cooperate on it. The printing is done by the Printing Bureau of the Ministry of Finance which has a somewhat similar function to the HMSO of the United Kingdom or the GPO of the United States.

The minutes of the Plenary meetings are distributed as special supplements of the Official Gazette. Anybody can purchase them at the Government Publications Service Centers or the Service Stations. The minutes of committee meetings are printed and distributed to the Members but are not circulated as supplements of the Official Gazette, although members of the general public are still able to purchase them if they apply to a certain Diet-related body.

The people can read the Minutes of the Diet in such public places as the Service Lobby of the House, the NDL and libraries of prefectural assemblies, to which the NDL sends them. The Minutes are also sent to some national libraries of foreign countries.  In addition, each House has recently opened a Web site on the Internet that includes the minutes of recent Plenary meetings.

It would be deceitful, however, if I said that the general public could use the Minutes of the Diet easily and whenever they wanted. We cannot expect the people to purchase the Minutes. For readers, the locations available are limited.  As a matter of fact, the NDL is the only institution that keeps a complete set of the Minutes ready for use by the general public.

3. Development in the retrieval of the Minutes of the Diet

(General Index to the Debates)

Apart from the question of the location of the Minutes of the Diet, it is essential for the accessibility of the Minutes that we have the means of searching the information in them and reaching the specific part of them. The NDL has been compiling and annually publishing the General Index to the Debates in book form from the 39th Session which was convened in September 1961. It consists of two volumes, namely, Speakers Index and Subjects Index.

The work of compiling of the General Index to the Debates, which used to be done manually using cards, has been transformed into electronic compilation with computers from the 58th Session convened in December 1967. Since then the data have been accumulated electronically. Using this mass of data in electronic form, the database of the General Index to the Debates was developed in FY1982.

(Optical Disc Filing System)

What has been described above, however, is nothing but an index, and after retrieving the General Index to the Debates, you still have to go and locate the minutes themselves and physically find the pages you want.

The Optical Disc Filing System for the Minutes of the Diet was developed, starting in 1992, to enable these two jobs to be done simultaneously. The system stores the Minutes of the Diet in optical magnetic discs as image data, and links them with the index database which is also improved in a user-friendly way on the menu-display method. By this means, you can retrieve the index database and display, print and transmit by facsimile, texts of the Minutes selected from the results of the retrieval.

The input of data into optical magnetic discs was started in FY1992. The scanning of the Minutes for the first session (1947) to the latest was completed in FY1996.

4. Full-text Database for the Minutes of the Diet

(Background)

The Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet is something completely different from the preceding databases. Whereas the General Index database and the Optical Disc Filing System use already-printed Minutes to index and digitize as image data, the Full-text Database System enables stenographers to compile the Minutes efficiently as digital data from the beginning, and enables users to make full-text search into the contents, reach the specific part directly, display the text and download it.

In FY 1994, the NDL and the Secretariats of the two Houses jointly commissioned a private company to help them carry out research on a full-text database of the Diet Minutes. The three organizations continued research and developed a prototype of the system in FY 1995, again commissioning a technology consulting body.

In June 1995, the Librarian of the NDL and the Secretaries General of both Houses signed an agreement which stipulates three objectives for the development of the full-text database system: (1) To improve the means of delivering the contents of the Diet deliberations to the Diet Members and to the general public; (2) To improve the efficiency of work done by the three organizations for the compilation and provision of the Minutes of the Diet; and (3) To make the Diet open, promoting information access to it, in line with the efforts for information disclosure in the administrative and judicial branches of the Government.

After having taken the above-mentioned steps, the Library and the two Houses jointly started the development of the Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet in FY 1996.

(Outline of the System)

The system consists of four subsystems - the texts-producing support system, the research support system, the retrieval system, and the retrospective input system. The former two subsystems help staff members of the Records Departments to compile the Minutes in a speedy and accurate manner.  The two Houses are mainly responsible for the development of these systems.  The retrieval subsystem allows users to carry out full-text search and display the text chosen. The NDL is working on this system. The retrospective input system converts past Minutes stored in optical magnetic discs as image data into digital text data, using a kind of OCR, and incorporates them into the database. This subsystem is being developed jointly by the three organizations.

The retrieval system adopts a menu-display method. You can enter any word or, to be precise, any part of any word or sentence, which might be spoken in the Diet meetings. A combination retrieval equivalent to the so-called 'and/or' search is available. You can also retrieve the system by the names of Diet Members, Ministers, government officials, witnesses and other speakers, the name of the party to which each Diet Member belongs, the role of the speaker, the title of the speaker (such as Chairman of Fair Trade Commission), and the period, the session number, House or Committee's name, if you wish to specify. In this case, you do not always have to enter the exact name or word; what you need to do is just to pick out the appropriate one from possible candidates on the screen. Then a list of the Minutes which contains the keyword appears, from which you can choose one to let the text be displayed. The keyword entered is highlighted in color and underlined. The speakers' list is always shown on the left side of the display. By marking the box attached to each record in the list, you can make a group of records to be downloaded for editing and printing. The System is also linked with the printed Minutes stored as image data, so that you can download and print the Minutes as they originally looked.

5. Schedule for the future

The development of the Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet is finishing its first stage. The database is now available as an in-house system for the Diet Members and staff members working in the Diet Buildings. With regard to the accumulation of data, we started to store the minutes of the Plenary meetings and the Budget Committee in the 142nd Session convened in January 1998. The coverage of data will be expanded to all committees in April 1999 and to back sessions (from 1947) by the end of FY2002.

Meanwhile, the database is scheduled to be available to the public on the Internet in January 1999. (The description of Sec. 4 applies to the already-developed in-house system. Some of the functions may be changed in the Internet version.)

As mentioned earlier, the Minutes of the Diet are a rich and precious source of information about the key issues Japan faces now or confronted in the past, but the access to them has been limited. The Full-text Database, being posted on the net, will actually make public the Minutes and thus provide the people of Japan with an opportunity to know the political process and get involved in it, and at the same time provide people of the world with direct and accurate information about Japan.

Japanologists around the world, I hope, will soon be able to consult this database that covers a wide range of topics and time span, along with newspaper databases, periodical article databases, OPACs of major libraries and other internet resources.

* Head, International Liaison Section, International Cooperation Division, 
Library Cooperation Department, The National Diet Library (JAPAN)

up