Defense ministry’s delayed revelation fuels cover-up suspicions

April 4, 2018

Tokyo- Suspicions of a cover-up by the Japanese Defense Ministry arose again after the ministry took more than two months before announcing this week the discovery of Ground Self-Defense Force documents which it initially insisted were "nonexistent."

In response to information disclosure requests from lawmakers in February last year, the ministry denied the existence of daily activity logs from GSDF troops engaged in postwar reconstruction support in Iraq in 2004-2006.

According to the latest announcement, however, the Iraq activity reports were found during a probe started last November, in the wake of a cover-up scandal last year involving similar reports from GSDF troops on a U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan.

The existence of the Iraq reports was then reported to the general administration department of the GSDF's Ground Staff Office by its Ground Research and Development Command on Jan. 12 this year and by the office's medical department on Jan. 31.

But the SDF Joint Staff was not informed of the discovery of the documents until Feb. 27, and Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera remained uninformed until last Saturday. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Onodera revealed the discovery.

"I wonder why it came out now," Kiyomi Tsujimoto, parliamentary affairs chief of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, told reporters on Monday. "This would be a big problem if the ministry has intentionally kept it secret."

Onodera vowed on Tuesday to thoroughly review the internal process. "We'll double-check what happened (until the announcement)," he told reporters.

Critics point out that the document discovery was announced after the enactment of the government's fiscal 2018 budget on March 28.

During a hearing with ministry officials jointly held by opposition parties on Tuesday, a spate of opposition lawmakers voiced suspicions that the ministry may have wanted to avoid the implications of the discovery on parliamentary deliberations on the budget.

A senior Defense Ministry official denied this allegation, noting that there remain barriers among the ministry's internal bureaus, the Self-Defense Forces Joint Staff and the GSDF command, in terms of information disclosure.

Another ministry official attributed the delayed announcement to preparations for the briefing to the defense minister and possible parliamentary questions over the matter.

The opposition camp still suspects that the ministry has been hesitating to make the document discovery public, in the midst of a document manipulation scandal engulfing the Ministry of Finance over a controversial state land deal with nationalist school operator Mortitomo Gakuen.

Even some ruling coalition lawmakers have expressed suspicions over the delayed announcement.

"I guess they decided to deny the existence of the Iraq reports just because they did so for the South Sudan reports," a member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said.

Another ruling bloc lawmaker mentioned the "possibility of a cover-up designed to make the ministry's responses (to the two cases) consistent." Jiji Press