Japan.UAP in Japan's National Diet · Asakawa's questions and the government's answers (2022–2024)

Between February 2022 and July 2024, Yoshiharu Asakawa, a member of the House of Representatives for the Nippon Ishin no Kai party, brought UAP before Japan's lower house in more than fifteen committee sessions: cabinet, land and transport, budget, audit and, above all, national security. In his first substantive intervention, on 8 April 2022 in the cabinet committee, he noted that in the two years since the US government released its videos the Diet had not discussed the matter once. From the outset he framed it as a security question: a UFO is not by definition an alien craft, he said, and what a pilot sees could be a Chinese hypersonic missile or a drone.

The answers that day set the tone for those that followed. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno summarised Washington's steps —the videos of April 2020, the report of June 2021 and the office created that November— and acknowledged that the United States saw UAP as a risk to flight safety and to defence, but said Japan had no plans to create a dedicated body. State Minister of Defence Makoto Oniki confirmed that the Japan–US defence ministers' meeting of 29 August 2020 had touched on what Washington was doing about UAP, and declined to give further detail "given the relationship with the US side". Cabinet Office State Minister Keitaro Ohno said that when he watched the videos he wondered whether they were insects on the lens. And the Civil Aviation Bureau answered something Asakawa had raised a month earlier: according to the airlines consulted, no pilot had been moved to a ground job merely for reporting an unidentified object.

In 2023 the exchange moved to the security committee and the Ministry of Defence. On 23 March, Taro Yamato of the Joint Staff said that since the directive of September 2020 no such object had been confirmed, and explained that airspace-violation reports have an "other" category covering aircraft from third countries or flocks of birds picked up by radar. On 14 April, Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada said there was no specific channel with the United States for sharing UAP information, and Yamato added that the ministry does not reveal whether it holds UAP records because that would reveal its collection capability, though he did not rule out publishing them if one day there were something to explain to the public. On 9 November, the new minister, Minoru Kihara, acknowledged that Asakawa had testified at the Mexican Congress's UAP hearing of September 2023 —the one in ↗— and admitted that when he received the question he did not understand the term, because the ministry does not use it: there they speak of "unidentifiable objects in the air". On 7 December, the Joint Staff repeated the official line: the government has never confirmed the existence of unidentified flying objects that appear to come from beyond the Earth, and no report has come in since 2020.

In 2024 the questions went up a level. On 8 February, in the budget committee, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said that thanks to Asakawa he had learned the term and its change from "aerial" to "anomalous", and that in an emergency the government would activate its crisis offices. On 12 March, Kihara said he had read AARO's historical report in full (↗), which found no evidence of anything extraterrestrial, and drew a conclusion: if a UAP is not Japanese, it belongs to another country, and the risk that such objects are other states' weapons or spy aircraft had to be tackled with the United States. On 13 June, looking back on two years of questions in that committee, Asakawa announced that a parliamentary league to elucidate unidentified anomalous phenomena from a national-security perspective had just been founded, chaired by former minister Hamada, with the committee chairman Shinjiro Koizumi as secretary-general and Asakawa himself as secretariat director; Christopher Mellon spoke at the founding meeting. At that session a survey of ministries was carried out: the Civil Aviation Bureau said that in the five years of retained records no captain had reported a UAP as a threat to flight safety; the Fisheries Agency, that its patrol vessels had no report; the Ministry of Education, that neither JAXA nor the National Astronomical Observatory was researching the subject. Kihara closed by saying that no office was under consideration. On 30 July, Yamato, by then Director General of Defence Policy, clarified that his bureau coordinates information on unidentifiable objects. After that date, the word UAP does not appear again in the Diet's records.

These records are the complete account of how a G7 government answers in its parliament when asked, again and again, about UAP. The line did not move in two and a half years: nothing has been confirmed, the ministry does not use the term, it will not say which records exist because that would reveal intelligence capabilities, and everything is coordinated with the United States. It is the parliamentary complement to the protocol in ↗: the directive says what pilots must do, and the records say what has come of it, which according to the government is nothing.

The contrast with Washington is instructive. In the US Congress, hearings bring witnesses who allege hidden programmes; in the Diet, the questions came almost always from a single member and the answers were procedural. Political weight arrived late and by another route: a parliamentary league chaired by a former defence minister, with Shinjiro Koizumi, who months later would run for prime minister, as secretary-general. The June 2024 survey also yields a useful negative datum —five years of mandatory civil-aviation reports and the fisheries patrol vessels' reports without a single UAP—, but Asakawa himself offered the other reading: pilots who feared reassignment if they spoke, and a culture in the Self-Defense Forces of not passing up information that embarrasses a superior. An empty register can mean that nothing happens or that nobody writes it down, and the records do not let us tell which; it is the same stigma problem the United States tried to solve with its reporting channels.

Kihara's reasoning of March 2024 also shows how other people's conclusions get imported: since AARO found no evidence of anything extraterrestrial, whatever is unidentified must belong to another country. AARO does not make that deduction —the office keeps cases unresolved—, but the inference turns the subject into one of state threat, which is the frame in which Japan is willing to spend. That is why the case weighs on the mundane narrative and, second, on that of another state's technology. The ↗ episode, which reached the Diet in 2026 already speaking only of drones and aircraft, confirms the pattern: Japanese politics processes the phenomenon as airspace surveillance, not as a mystery.