Defense chief apologizes over GSDF daily logs in Iraq

April 4, 2018

Tokyo- Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera apologized Tuesday for his ministry's initial failure to discover daily activity reports compiled by Ground Self-Defense Force troops sent to Iraq in 2004-2006.

"I apologize for the ministry's failure to find the documents in question," Onodera said at a press conference on Tuesday, a day after he revealed that the daily reports of the GSDF mission in Iraq have been found.

In response to information disclosure requests from lawmakers in February last year, the government had initially said that such activity logs did not exist.

The government looks certain to face further criticism for sloppy management of official documents as the discovery came in the wake of the Finance Ministry's admission last month of the tampering of ministry documents related to the controversial discounted sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen, a school operator at the center of favoritism allegations against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, political watchers said.

The GSDF's Ground Research and Development Command reported the discovery of the Iraq activity logs to the general administration department of the GSDF's Ground Staff Office on Jan. 12. The office's medical department also found the activity logs on Jan. 26. The defense minister was informed of the discovery on Saturday, about two and a half months after the discovery.

Onodera said Tuesday that when he briefed Abe on the discovery of the reports on Monday, the prime minister instructed him to scrutinize and disclose the details of how the ministry handled the documents.

Onodera said Monday that as a result of the ministry's reinvestigation, some 14,000 pages of logs recording the GSDF troops' activities in Iraq for a total of 376 days have been found in electronic and paper versions.

The documents included logs for 319 days of activities by the GSDF group supporting postwar reconstruction in Iraq.

In February last year, then Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said at a parliamentary meeting that the ministry had been unable to find the reports.

The reinvestigation was conducted after a cover-up scandal in the ministry over activity logs from GSDF engineering troops on a U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan that revealed the dangers the troops faced in the conflict-torn African nation. The ministry initially said it had discarded the South Sudan reports, but they were discovered later.

Inada resigned from her post to take the blame for the scandal.

Inada said Tuesday she believes that the Iraq activity reports were discovered as a result of a thorough reinvestigation based on the lesson learned from the document scandal over the GSDF engineering troops' operations in South Sudan from 2012 to 2017.

At a press conference, Kenta Izumi, parliamentary affairs chief of the opposition Party of Hope, called for summoning Inada to parliament to testify as an unsworn witness over the Iraq reports.

Meanwhile, Onodera revealed Monday that the ministry has found two additional sets of documents about Japan-U.S. talks that have the same title as one disclosed last year but are different in content. The first documents, created by the ministry's Joint Staff Office in July 2012, were about bilateral defense cooperation.

The minister said Tuesday that document data were updated after an information disclosure request was made in May last year. He ruled out the possibility of the first set of documents having been doctored.

At a press conference the same day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called on the ministry and the Self-Defense Forces to manage official documents and disclose information properly in line with new document control rules that took effect this month.

Suga also suggested that the government will accelerate efforts for shifting to an electronic system that can manage the update history of official documents. Jiji Press