Aso hints ministers approve documents without reading them

April 12, 2018

Tokyo- Japanese Minister of Finance Taro Aso suggested Thursday that ministers do not read all of administrative documents submitted to cabinet meetings for approval.

"When it comes to whether ministers read all the documents, I'd say I think the reality is that they glance at the papers," he said at a meeting of the Committee on Financial Affairs of the House of Councillors.

The remarks may stir controversy as they could be taken to indicate that Japanese cabinet ministers give the green light to documents on important policies and bills without knowing their contents.

Aso said at a parliamentary meeting on Wednesday that he sometimes gives stamps of approval to documents that he does not read.

At Thursday's committee meeting, Aso said, "As a practical matter, cabinet meetings would never end if ministers read the whole of a huge volume of papers," while stressing that he "takes responsibility" for documents he approves.

He also said that Vice Minister of Finance Junichi Fukuda was reprimanded over his alleged sexual harassment against female journalists, as reported by the Shukan Shincho weekly magazine.

Aso hinted that no punishment tougher than a warning is needed for the top Ministry of Finance bureaucrat although the opposition side urged Fukuda to quit.

Kohei Otsuka, head of the Democratic Party, said at a press conference on Thursday that Fukuda should consider stepping down.

At a separate press conference, Kenta Izumi, parliamentary affairs chief of the Party of Hope, said: "If the reported sexual harassment is confirmed true, that would be outrageous. In that case, Aso should immediately dismiss Fukuda."

"Fukuda should be fired right now," Kazuo Shii, leader of the Japanese Communist Party, told reporters the same day.

On a media report that the MOF's Kinki Local Finance Bureau asked the transport ministry's aviation bureau in Osaka Prefecture to increase the estimated amount of waste buried at a state land lot sold to school operator Moritomo Gakuen, which is at the center of a favoritism scandal, Mitsuru Ota, director-general of the ministry's Financial Bureau, said at the Upper House committee meeting that the ministry will investigate whether the report by the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese daily, is true.

The newspaper reported on Thursday that the local transport bureau, based on the request by the MOF bureau, increased the estimated costs for removing the waste by hundreds of millions of yen from the initial projection.

The aviation bureau eventually estimated the amount of waste at the site in the western Japan prefecture at 19,520 tons and the costs for removing it at some 820 million yen. The state land was sold to Moritomo Gakuen at 134 million yen with the deduction of the waste disposal costs in 2016.

Earlier this week, the MOF admitted that an official of the Kinki finance bureau asked the Moritomo Gakuen side to lie by saying that thousands of trucks were used to remove the waste.

If the request for the aviation bureau to pad the waste amount is confirmed to have been actually made, the foundation for the huge discount could be shaken further, pundits said. Jiji Press