Prime Minister Shinzo Abe showed no willingness to make serious efforts to clear up allegations against his administration as he responded to opposition questions at a Jan. 27 Lower House Budget Committee.

Instead of offering sincere, straightforward answers to questions from opposition lawmakers, Abe mostly read from prepared texts and repeated the same answers even to questions framed differently.

On the first day of the Lower House Budget Committee session, Abe’s performance was as disappointing as it was during last week’s plenary sessions of both houses when party representatives made speeches to pose questions to the prime minister’s Jan. 20 policy address at the outset of the current ordinary Diet session.

During these sessions, where Abe made one response statement to each questioning speech, he did his best to dodge questions and only offered boilerplate answers designed to avoid political risks.

But his attitude remained unchanged even during the Budget Committee session where he responded to each question as it was asked. The way Abe responded to questions about allegations concerning three scandals asked by five lawmakers of a unified opposition bloc prevented meaningful discussions from taking place.

With regard to allegations concerning the annual cherry blossom viewing party hosted by the prime minister, Abe said the number of members of his local support group invited to the event grew “as a result of a long-standing practice.”

He again refused an opposition lawmaker’s request for disclosure of detailed information about the expenses for a banquet at a Tokyo hotel held on the eve of the cherry blossom viewing event that was sponsored by Abe’s support group, saying that the hotel is declining to submit the document.

Abe also rejected another opposition demand concerning the destruction of digital data about the list of guests invited to the party, saying he sees no need to check the computer’s history file to identify the date of the data deletion.

We cannot accept his arguments unless he offers convincing evidence to support them.

With regard to a bribery scandal linked to the administration’s initiative to promote integrated resorts featuring casinos, opposition legislators urged Abe to investigate would-be casino operators’ contacts with local governments seeking to host such a resort.

But Abe also turned down this request, saying it is impossible to make such a probe at this stage because the process of selecting the municipalities to host an IR resort has yet to begin.

When asked whether he thinks the two former Cabinet members who have resigned over alleged election law irregularities have fulfilled their responsibility to answer the allegations against them, Abe refused to voice his own opinion, saying only it is up to the public to judge.

Opposition lawmakers also raised questions concerning the revelation that Anri Kawai, a lawmaker suspected of election law violations, received 150 million yen ($1.37 million) from the Liberal Democratic Party for her Upper House election campaign last summer. To be sure, the Political Funds Control Law does not impose any legal limit on the amount a party’s headquarters can supply to a local chapter.

But the fact is that the LDP only gave 15 million yen to the other party candidate in the same Hiroshima district, an incumbent.

Abe denied his involvement in the decisions, saying the LDP’s headquarters handles all political funding matters.

But these facts seem to underscore afresh the Abe administration’s tendency to give special favors to friends and allies.

This tendency was highlighted by political scandals concerning the dubious sale of state-owned land to Moritomo Gakuen, an Osaka-based school operator linked to Abe’s wife, and the government’s decision to allow the Kake Educational Institution, run by a close friend of Abe, to open a new veterinary medicine faculty.

An opposition party leader advocating the choice of separate surnames among married couples said a female ruling party lawmaker heckled him during last week’s Lower House plenary session by saying that people who want that policy don’t have to get married.

Abe’s response to the outrageous heckling was another example of dodging his responsibility.

When Yuichiro Tamaki, head of the Democratic Party for the People, pushed for legal changes that would allow women to keep their family names upon marriage during the session, the LDP lawmaker then blurted out that marriage is unnecessary for such people.

Opposition parties believe the words came from Mio Sugita, a Lower House member of the LDP, and has asked the party to check whether that is the case.

But Abe only said, “I’m not in a position to comment on irregular remarks at the Diet.”

He also said he had asked Hiroshi Moriyama, the LDP’s Diet Affairs Committee chairman, to handle the case. But Moriyama has said he has no plan to question Sugita about the matter.

These remarks seem to indicate the Abe administration’s intention to wait for opposition criticism to blow over and let the issue sink into the fog of oblivion.

The administration should not be allowed to continue resorting to this familiar tactic to avoid answering questions.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 28