Photo/Illutration Tadashi Matsumaru, left, and Teruyuki Ogoshi, lawyers for the widow of a Finance Ministry official who committed suicide, hold up the blacked out pages sent to the bereaved family about his death. (Satoru Ogawa)

The life of a happy and outgoing Finance Ministry bureaucrat was turned upside down after he received a phone call on Feb. 26, 2017.

It was a Sunday, so Toshio Akagi was visiting a park with his wife and mother-in-law, as he often did.

The phone call was from his superior at the Kinki Local Finance Bureau.

“My boss seems to have a problem so I will go and help him,” Akagi told his wife.

At his office, he was instructed to falsify a document related to the sale of state-owned land to the Moritomo Gakuen educational institution.

At that time, suspicions had grown that Moritomo Gakuen received a huge discount for the land because of the institution’s close ties to Akie Abe, the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Akagi told his wife, “I was ordered to do something that could take down the administration.”

About a year later, Akagi committed suicide.

The lawsuit filed by Akagi’s widow on March 18 with the Osaka District Court seeks a total of 112 million yen ($1 million) in compensation from the government and a former Finance Ministry official who is believed to have given the orders for the falsifications.

The lawsuit also describes how Akagi, who had often attended art exhibitions and “rakugo” comic story-telling performances, grew increasingly despondent after he received the initial order to falsify public documents.

Lawyers for the widow also released notes left behind by Akagi: seven pages stored on his home computer, two handwritten pages, and a three-page handwritten will.

The writing was rather shaky for a man whose hobbies included calligraphy.

“I put up considerable resistance” he wrote in his notes.

But in the end, Akagi followed the order. As he received further instructions for document falsification, he fell deeper into despair. In July 2017, he was diagnosed with depression, making it difficult for him to go to work.

In December 2017, investigators at the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office called Akagi and asked what he knew about the matter.

Feeling that he could become a scapegoat for something that he had opposed, his mental state worsened, according to the notes.

In March 2018, he killed himself.

According to her lawyers, Akagi’s wife said of that time, “I felt like half of my body had been torn from me.”

But things would not get any better for the widow.

Through her lawyers, she asked Nobuhisa Sagawa, who was director-general of the Finance Ministry’s Financial Bureau at the time the documents were falsified, for an apology and an explanation on how the falsification took place. But she was never able to meet with Sagawa.

Akagi’s suicide was later confirmed as being work-related, but large parts of the report that was given to the bereaved family were blacked out, making it impossible to learn the reason for his death.

“Even after all possible means were exhausted, she was unable to find answers to her questions,” Teruyuki Ogoshi, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, said at the March 18 news conference. “For the bereaved family, the only remaining step was to file a lawsuit.”

Hiroshi Miyake, a lawyer who has long been involved in management of public documents, said Akagi’s notes serve as a clear warning about the shoddy manner in which public documents have been handled by central government ministries.

“I wonder if the decision by Sagawa alone could have led to such an extent of document falsification,” Miyake said. “The court proceedings should be observed as an issue concerning the entire Finance Ministry as an organization rather than one concerning only Sagawa.”

Miyake added that everyone should hold greater interest in the handling of public documents since it is one of the core supports of a democracy.

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