Results of Probe into GSDF Iraq Logs to Be Released on Wed.

May 22, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Defense Ministry plans to release on Wednesday the results of its in-house probe into the discovery of daily activity reports for the Ground Self-Defense Force's Iraq mission in 2004-2006 that the ministry initially claimed did not exist, it was learned Monday.

Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of Komeito, the coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, unveiled the release schedule in a speech in Tokyo. The plan was also confirmed by a government source.

The ministry is apparently trying to divert the public attention from the GSDF log issue by releasing the investigation results on Wednesday, when the Ministry of Finance is also slated to submit to the Diet, the country's parliament, original documents on the questionable huge discount sale of a state land lot to school operator Moritomo Gakuen, pundits said.

The MOF has been under fire for falsifying the documents on the sale of the land in Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, to Moritomo.

Also on Wednesday, the ruling bloc plans to put controversial work style reform bills to a vote at a relevant committee of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet.

In early April, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said that daily activity reports of the GSDF troops dispatched to Iraq for supporting the country's postwar reconstruction had been discovered.

It has also been learned that at least several officials at the GSDF's former Ground Research and Development Command, now the Training Evaluation Research and Development Command, were aware of the existence of the activity logs as of March 27, 2017, when Tomomi Inada was in the post of defense minister.

The focus of the investigation is why it took about a year to report the discovery of the logs in question to the chief of the ministry, the sources said.

Onodera, who assumed the minister's post in early August 2017, plans to punish those involved.

On April 4 this year, the Defense Ministry established the investigation team headed by Parliamentary Vice Defense Minister Keitaro Ono. The team mainly conducted hearings with people related to the former Ground Research and Development Command. Jiji Press