THE TRANS-ATLANTIC DEBATE

In the wake of the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the ruling of the Court of Justice in the European Union (CJEU) in Google Spain, the right to be forgotten has become one of the most controversial topics in data protection around the globe For instance, the right to be forgotten has been described as ‘a form of censorship, one that would most likely be unconstitutional if attempted in the United States’ .

It is well described that ‘Americans want to be famous while the French want to be forgotten’ Forgetfulness with legal enforcement may be a beauty of privacy, but may also be a threat to the free fl ow of information The right to be forgotten without thinking of free speech is dangerous, and the free fl ow of information in the Internet without privacy protection is savage.

Considering the debate between the EU and the US on the right to be forgotten, this chapter aims to clarify the ongoing debate and issues on the right to be forgotten in Japan, including some judicial decisions, the legislative debate and the standard of delisting.

JUDICIAL DECISIONS IN JAPAN

FOR THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN

On 22 December 2015, Saitama District Court, in a case seeking the delisting of a criminal case of child prostitution, three years earlier, held that ‘even the criminal, who was broadcasted and known to the society on his or her arrest, has the right to respect for his or her private life as a right to personality … and “ the right to be forgotten “ of the previous criminal the society, depending on the nature of the crime’ In this case, the court particularly considered the difficulty of deleting information on the Internet in modern society in light of the interest of rehabilitation.

As another example, on 9 October 2014, Tokyo District Court declared that Google should delist 122 search results of the plaintiffwho used to belong to a group with a bad reputation The court found that ‘it is obvious that even the titles and the snippets themselves constitute infringement of the data subject's right to personality’ .