It was like dreaming of a break on a sunny tropical beach during a long, lonely, icy winter. In the 33 months I was involved in a stressful legal battle with Oricon magazine (which compiles Japan’s most widely referred-to music charts), I would often picture myself traveling in the United States to conduct research for a book I planned to write about the “SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) issue.

The first part of my dream came true in February. In just under a month, I traveled over 25,000 km around the country, conducting more than 10 intensive interviews with lawyers, state congress staff, media specialists, public-interest advocacy groups, university professors and others concerned about how SLAPPs threaten free speech.

When I received a certified letter from the Tokyo District Court in December 2006 informing me that Oricon was suing me for libel and demanding ¥50 million in damages, I innocently expected the court would quickly throw the suit out. I thought Oricon’s claim was irrational and meritless, but I also understood that the lawsuit’s real purpose was to intimidate me by forcing a burden (attorneys’ fees, physical and mental fatigue, loss of income) on my shoulders.

First, the company sued me for an article, not written by me, that appeared in the April 2006 issue of Cyzo magazine. Secondly, Oricon did not sue the writer, editor or publisher of the article. Thirdly, they sued me for an article in which I was merely quoted (I was interviewed by telephone). Fourthly, and most importantly, Oricon President Koh Koike issued a press release in which he declared: “If Mr. Ugaya admits his mistakes and apologizes publicly, we would be happy to drop the case.”

But the reality turned out to be the opposite of what I had expected. On April 22, 2008, the court ruled that I was guilty and had to pay ¥10 million in damages to Oricon. I found my situation too surreal to believe; it was like being in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. If an interviewee is sued and ruled out of order for speaking to the mass media, who would dare to do so in future? Wasn’t this a transparent abuse of the right to sue, one that violates the right to free speech, which is protected by Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan?

Eventually I discovered some significant facts. The legal concept of SLAPP does not exist in Japan. Not a single piece of SLAPP-related literature has been translated into Japanese. There is no law to deter malicious lawsuits that aim to discourage public speech.

I asked various lawyers and academics said to be experts on free-speech issues, only to find that none of them was sufficiently informed about SLAPP to answer my questions. I then did a search on Google for SLAPP. Among the more than 190,000 results I found was a website titled “California Anti-SLAPP Project” (www.casp.net). Then I did the same thing on Amazon.com and found a book titled SLAPPs: Getting Sued For Speaking Out.

After the Tokyo District Court’s ruling against me, I filed an appeal with the Tokyo High Court. On Aug. 3, 2009, that court ruled in my favor, and so I finally had time to start my SLAPP investigation in earnest. Given the lack of awareness concerning the SLAPP issue in Japan, I thought it would be a good idea to go to the United States to conduct research into SLAPPs and tell the Japanese people what I found out. Having previously worked as Aera magazine’s New York correspondent, I knew my way around the U.S.

I e-mailed Mark Goldowitz, director of the Berkeley-based California Anti-SLAPP Project public-interest advocacy group, and Professor George Pring of the University of Denver and Professor Penelope Cannan of the University of Central Florida, co-authors of SLAPPs: Getting Sued For Speaking Out. My message was simple: “I am a Japanese journalist in Tokyo who has been sued for speaking out publicly. In my country nobody knows what SLAPP is. Please lend a hand to my Marco Polo-like research mission on SLAPP so that I can share my knowledge with the Japanese public in order to tell them what they need to know to promote free speech and democracy.”

They responded quickly, and generously offered to help me. Goldowitz became my key source of information. He and I exchanged more than 100 e-mails in the four months before I visited him. During that time he tirelessly e-mailed me lists and e-mail addresses of people he suggested I see, books and articles to read and even PDF files of cases he thought I should study.

Pring and Cannan kindly took time from their busy schedules to be interviewed by me for as long as four hours. They opened the door for me in my study of the SLAPP issue in the U.S. Before I met them in person, I would often bow with a deep sense of gratitude in front of my PC at home whenever I found e-mails in my inbox they had sent to me late at night or on weekends.

As soon as I went on the road, I realized the trip would be much more physically demanding than I had imagined – the United States is just too big. I couldn’t take a day off, because I was doing interviews or traveling every day.

After I arrived in San Francisco, I spent a week driving to different places in California, traveling a total distance of some 1,000 km in that state alone. Then I flew to Washington, D.C., Orlando and Denver. At the end of my trip I became ill because of flying back and forth between time zones and the 30 C differences in temperature.

Nonetheless, I found the trip thrilling and full of discoveries. For example, in 1992 the state of California amended some parts of its Code of Civil Procedure to create the California Anti-SLAPP Law. That law allows defendants to file anti-SLAPP motions requesting courts to throw out meritless lawsuits that interfere with free speech. Whenever I described Oricon’s suit against me, legal experts in California just smiled calmly and said that if my case had been heard in that state, it would have been over in four to six months, or maybe even as quickly as one month.

I was shocked. I then asked how much I would have to pay if a SLAPP suit were brought against me in California. The answer was even more surprising. I was told that if the court found the suit to be a SLAPP action, the plaintiff would have to pay my legal fees. (The Oricon case cost me nearly ¥10 million in legal fees and lost income; the Tokyo High Court did not accept my claim that Oricon should compensate me for my financial losses.)

Moreover, I learned that 27 states and the territory of Guam have similar anti-SLAPP legal precedents or statutes, and that the first federal anti-SLAPP bill was proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives in late 2009.

I then asked about the problem of striking a balance between the right to sue and the right to free speech. I was dying to know the answer, because Japanese courts rule out “abuse of lawsuit” counterclaims in almost all civil lawsuits (including mine) on the basis that the right to sue is protected under the Constitution of Japan.

I was moved when I heard people such as Gene Wong, chief legislative counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the California State Senate and drafter of California’s Anti-SLAPP Law, tell me without hesitation or doubt that while have everyone has a constitutional right to sue, no one can abuse that right. This was exactly the position I took at the Tokyo District and High courts. But no Japanese judges accepted my argument.

However, the most encouraging part of my trip was not finding about the various anti-SLAPP laws in the U.S., but the helpful and supportive people I met. Almost everybody I contacted by e-mail accepted my interview request, and if they didn’t, politely apologized. The people I interviewed patiently and tirelessly answered a long string of questions. Some of them kept their weekends open for my visit, although I had come out of nowhere, all of a sudden. I often wondered whether Japanese would be so helpful if an American reporter visited Japan and did what I was doing. When you are shown such kindness, you resolve to help others in the future – that’s how I feel now.

If I had to name the person I met on my travels for whom I had the deepest respect, it would be one-time SLAPP target Rich Meyers. He is a 65-year-old retired salesman who lives in the town of Dry Creek, near the city of Oroville in California’s Central Valley. Meyers and his wife Darlyne have a deep love of nature, growing vegetables and keeping birds and animals. When the North Continent Land and Timber mining company started operating near the community’s water source in 2007, Meyers organized a group called the Dry Creek Coalition to safeguard the town’s clean water.

The company filed a $1million lawsuit against him and other local residents, claiming that they had violated trade secrets by posting a photo of the company’s mining mill on the Dry Creek Coalition website (http://saveourcreek.weebly.com/).

When Meyers was driving his car to take me up to the ridge from where he planned to show me the mining site, a young man driving a pickup truck began following us. When we stopped and began taking pictures of the site, the young man started shouting, “Don’t take pictures! You guys are not allowed to come up here!” He had been employed by the mining company but lost his job after North Continent Land and Timber stopped operations at the mine when it lost the anti-SLAPP lawsuit. He shouted: “You took my job! You took my job by filing a fuckin’ lawsuit!” I was worried, because his voice was turning violent. But Meyers stayed perfectly calm and talked to him quietly, but firmly. “No, that’s not true,” he said. “You lost your job not because of the lawsuit, but because your employer’s job was illegal.” The young man’s passion faded, and he ended up smiling and shaking hands with Meyers.

“For the first time in the 30 years we’ve lived here, we must lock our house’s gate and our cars,” Meyers said with a wistful smile. But he said that he and his wife are determined not to move out of a place they love. When I asked him if he was scared, he said no: “We didn’t violate anything. We just exercised our constitutional right.”

I found the fact that ordinary people like the Meyers firmly understand and believe in the principle of democracy (maybe better than many Japanese judges) very impressive. I was witnessing real grassroots democracy.

I financed the whole trip myself because no publisher was willing to lend a hand to my research project. I contacted more than five prominent Japanese publishers, all of whom enjoy a reputation for promoting social awareness, but unfortunately none of them supported my proposal to write a book about SLAPP. Their answers were all the same: “I know it’s important, but this book wouldn’t sell. Nobody knows the word SLAPP. You know, the publishing business is in bad shape.” In the end, I paid more than $5,000 of my own money for transportation and accommodation.

But that doesn’t bother me at all. It’s a journalist’s nature to feel professionally happy when he or she is the first person to report the news. Plus, it’s all the more rewarding when you hope that news will enhance free speech and democracy in your own country. My next step to find someone to publish my book on SLAPP lawsuits, in either Japanese or English. ❶