The government will not ask telephone companies to voluntarily participate in police wiretapping operations, Justice Minister Okiharu Yasuoka said Tuesday, the day that Japan's first-ever wiretapping law took effect.

"We will not ask these companies to develop equipment or send employees" to monitor police wiretapping without remuneration, he said, adding that authorities may instead rely on civil servants in municipal governments to serve as monitors.

Yasuoka's comments came after Japan's largest cellular phone company, NTT DoCoMo Inc., said it will refrain from sending staff to monitor operations due to concerns over cost and stress to its employees.

National Police Agency sources earlier said the agency had asked NTT DoCoMo to develop equipment needed to wiretap cellular phones without receiving compensation.

The law allows investigators to wiretap some private communications provided the operations are watched by designated monitors.

The crimes must involve illegal drugs, guns or murder thought to have been committed by organized crime groups, or the mass smuggling of people into Japan. Land lines, cellular phones, faxes or e-mail can all be wiretapped.

The law states that monitors must be telephone service company employees. However, if those employees are unavailable, workers from local municipalities can be used.

Several telephone companies other than NTT DoCoMo, which has a 60 percent share of the domestic cellular phone market, will provide the monitors, a Justice Ministry source said.

The chief of the National Public Safety Commission, Mamoru Nishida, also said, "We have to accept situations (such as NTT DoCoMo's) and refrain from placing an excessive burden on the phone companies."

But Nishida said that the commission has not received any reports by the NPA about NTT DoCoMo's plan.

Bugging-abuse worries

As wiretapping legislation took effect Tuesday, opposition lawmakers and citizens reaffirmed their opposition to the law and pledged to scrap it at the earliest opportunity.

The controversial law, which passed the Diet last August, allows law enforcement authorities to wiretap citizens' telephones, e-mail and other communication tools in the course of investigating organized crime.

Opposition parties have demonstrated an "unusual unity to protect democracy" through the campaign to scrap the law, said Atsushi Hashimoto, an Upper House member of the Japanese Communist Party, at a gathering held Tuesday in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward.

Opposition parties, consisting of the Democratic Party of Japan, the JCP and the Social Democratic Party, jointly submitted a bill to abolish the law to the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors in the last Diet session.

Hashimoto and other opposition legislators said they will continue to cooperate with one another in upcoming sessions.

Yu Terasawa, a freelance journalist covering police corruption, said he believes police will use the law for inappropriate purposes despite authorities' assertion that this will not happen.

He said he was followed by police officers in October 1996 after he wrote a series of articles in a weekly magazine revealing secret dealings between Tokyo Metropolitan Police officials and members of gangster groups. His reports eventually led to several officials being punished.

When he filed suit against the MPD, he said, police argued that they were following him as part of their investigation into Aum Shinrikyo, with which he said he is not involved.

Although the law requires authorities to obtain a court warrant for wiretapping, Terasawa said, "Police can effectively abuse the law as much as they like by fabricating a reason."

He said the legality of wiretapping poses as much a hindrance as wiretapping itself, saying he fears obtaining information from sources over the phone due to the "permanent possibility that (his) phone is bugged."

DoCoMo won't help

NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cellular phone services provider, has decided not to send employees to monitor police wiretaps, citing the cost and stress on workers, company sources said.

Wiretapping by authorities became legal Tuesday.

"We have decided not to send monitors in consideration of the responsibility and stress to be imposed on employees," as well as the cost of keeping monitors on duty across Japan, an official at NTT DoCoMo's legal affairs section said Monday.

According to the wiretap law, if telephone service providers such as NTT DoCoMo do not provide employees to monitor police wiretaps, the function then falls on municipal employees -- whether or not they know anything about the equipment involved.

Other companies aside from NTT DoCoMo -- which has a 60 percent share of the nation's cellphone market -- have said they will supply the monitors, the sources said.

Monitors are required to check, for example, whether investigators stick to the designated duration of a wiretap.

However, they are not able to monitor what investigators are listening to, or to stop wiretapping they think is illegal. Instead, they can submit a report to court.

They are to work around the clock with investigators for the duration of the wiretap, which could be 30 days.