Requirement from Supreme Level

It is discovered that there is an official document which indicates involvement of Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe in a governmental decision of establishing new faculty of veterinary in a school called Kake Gakuen run by Abe’s close friend. The document discloses a request of Cabinet Office to Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, or MEXT anyway, for permission of establishing new faculty, backed by supreme power of the executive offices. It is suspected that Abe has inappropriately exercised his executive power to do a favor for his close friend.

Asahi Shimbun made an exclusive report on it in Wednesday morning. The document obtained by Asahi was titled “Summary of Arrangement with a Senior Staff with Cabinet Office” made by a MEXT staff. It recorded the time of meeting as 18:30 ~ 18:55 of Monday September 26^th in 2016. In the meeting, the attendee from Cabinet Office urged MEXT to make the shortest schedule for opening of the school in April 2018. “This is what the supreme level in Prime Minister’s Official Residence is saying,” said the senior staff of Cabinet Office. “Supreme level” inevitably means Prime Minister.

The senior staff also put pressure on MEXT. “You have no choice of ‘impossible.’ If you do not make the official work as early as possible, you will have to take responsibility for it. It needs to be brought to political decision soon,” the document records. Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga questioned credibility of the document, saying “What kind of a document is it? Does it determine the day and time or organizational section of making it? A document of ministry is not ordinarily so.”

The opposite parties accused Abe of his involvement in the decision for the school. A lawmaker with Democratic Party, Yu-ichiro Tamaki, argued that the plan of establishing the veterinary faculty could have been promoted with strong pressure from Prime Minister in a Committee of House of Representatives on Wednesday. Minister of MEXT, Hirokazu Matsuno, explained that the Ministry had been restraining from establishing new veterinary faculty regarding supply and demand. Tamaki argued that supply of veterinarians were currently sufficient.

The biggest point must be the fact that Abe and the Chief Director of Kake Gakuen, Kotaro Kake, kept close friendship for a long time. First Lady, Akie Abe, has been the Honorable Principal of a kindergarten run by Kake Gakuen since June 2015. It is likely that Prime Minister Abe will deny his involvement in the decision, attributing it to voluntary favor by bureaucrats. But, it was necessary for the political leader to always check what his staffs were doing and use his power to avoid inappropriate decision. Abe did not do that in a case his old friend was related. The opposite parties accuse Abe of being in a same kind of scandal as South Korean ex-President Park Geun-hye committed.