Insufficient Disclosure of Moritomo Documents

Bereaved family of a staff of Kinki Finance Bureau (KFB), Toshio Akagi, who was involved in falsification of official documents and killed himself in 2018, decided to file another lawsuit, demanding further disclosure of documents related to the falsification. Although the Ministry of Finance (MOF) has disclosed 146,000 pages of copy, some important documents were dropped. Akagi’s wife hopes to know why her husband had to die.

An educational corporation, Moritomo Gakuen, obtained a government-owned land for building a new elementary school in Toyonaka city, Osaka, in 2016. While appraised value of the land was 956 million yen, it was sold at as low price as 134 million yen. The reason of the discount was explained as discovery of a large amount of debris underground. However, it was obvious that the price was regarded as extremely low price.

 

As wife of then prime minister, Akie Abe, was expected to be assuming the principal emeritus of the elementary school, it was speculated that the prime minister Shinzo Abe had an obscure relationship with Moritomo Gakuen. In a Diet debate of February 2017, Abe unequivocally declared that he and his wife had no relationship with Moritomo’s land contract, and he was willing to resign as prime minister and member of the Diet, if he or his wife was found to be involved in it.

 

This comment of Abe made the issue highly political. MOF delivered orders to its local branch, Kinki Finance Bureau, to delete any information of politicians from official documents related to the land sales to Moritomo. Recognizing it as an inappropriate falsification of official documents, a staff of KFB who was in charge of this tampering, Toshio Akagi, killed himself with regret of his involvement in March 2018.

 

Akagi’s wife, Masako, filed a lawsuit against MOF in 2020, demanding disclosure of related documents, and MOF approved it and started disclosing related documents in 2025. While the disclosed documents included communication between MOF and KFB, Masako could not find any email of then Director General of Financial Bureau, Nobuhisa Sagawa who was responsible for the organized falsification, or notebook of the superior of Akagi in KFB.

 

In the new lawsuit, Akagi’s wife demands disclosure of three notebooks of Akagi’s superior in KFB and voice file of meeting between KFB and Moritomo Gakuen over the contract of land sales. Akagi’s wife expressed her regret that necessary information had not provided in the series of disclosure by the MOF in her press conference.

 

The case of Moritomo Gakuen revealed invisible structure of politics in Japan, in which bureaucrats may commit to falsification of official documents to protect their big boss, or the prime minister. It is likely that the prime minister did not ask to delete his information from the documents, but the staffs in MOF voluntarily fabricated the record with “consideration” that some description in the documents would be working against their boss.

 

After Moritomo scandal was revealed, this kind of consideration became common among the people in Japan, calling it “sontaku” in Japanese language. It is necessary to disclose how the system of sontaku has been working between politicians and bureaucrats. And it must not be forgotten that the greatest question in this case is not how MOF made the falsification, but why KFB sold the land at that extremely low price.

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