Ex-aide to Abe corrects remark over labor survey

February 21, 2019

Tokyo--A former aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe corrected his past remark Wednesday, now admitting he had received a report on how discussions at a panel on a monthly labor survey were going.

Labor minister Takumi Nemoto pointed to the possibility that Motoya Nakae, the former aide, proposed to the panel a change to the survey methodology.

In a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting, Nakae said the labor ministry told him earlier on Wednesday that Takeshi Anezaki, then chief of the ministry's statistics and information division, said he met Nakae on Sept. 14, 2015, and spoke about what was discussed at the panel.

On Friday, Nakae told the same Lower House committee that he had no memory of receiving any report on the discussion outcomes though he remembered he had been informed of the start of the discussions at the panel.

In the monthly labor survey, past wage data were often revised down because the ministry replaced all survey samples in the category of midsize companies in regular sample reshuffles.

On Wednsday, Nakae said he may have told Anezaki at their September 2015 meeting that the panel should consider switching to partial sample replacement if the method better reflects the actual state of the economy in a more timely fashion.

According to minutes of discussions at the panel, its chair, Masahiro Abe, said at the fifth meeting in August 2015 that the across-the-board reshuffling method was appropriate.

But in the sixth meeting on Sept. 16 that year, two days after the meeting with Nakae, Anezaki proposed discussing the partial replacement method. The chair was absent that day.

This method was adopted in 2018. Jiji Press