Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heads to his office on June 12. (Takeshi Iwashita)

Government records give no indication of what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other top leaders said at meetings leading up to the decision to close schools nationwide to prevent COVID-19 infections.

On the request of Renho, an Upper House member of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the government released summaries of a coordination council’s meetings on measures to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The meetings, attended by Abe, relevant Cabinet ministers and high-ranking ministry officials, were held on Feb. 15, 26 and 27. The meeting on Feb. 27 concluded minutes before Abe held a news conference and requested that all schools across the country shut down.

But for each meeting, the summary consisted of only one or two pages. Each document contained the date, time, location and list of participants of the meeting.

The meetings lasted between 20 and 50 minutes, and the summary of what was said took up between six and 19 lines in the documents.

Among the 20 or so participants were Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, health minister Katsunobu Kato and Kazuhiro Sugita, a deputy chief Cabinet secretary. Kato did not attend the Feb. 26 meeting.

The summarized minutes gave no clues on what Abe, Suga or other government officials specifically said.

Such ambiguity has led to criticism that the government is hindering efforts to closely assess how policy decisions are made.

Yukiko Miki, head of the nonprofit organization Access-Info Clearing House, noted that the Feb. 27 coordination council meeting was held right before Abe asked all schools to close, a request that caught many educators and parents off-guard and affected millions of families.

“That announcement had a huge impact on the daily lives of the public,” Miki said. “It is just not right that we will not know who in the government said what and when in leading up to that decision.”

In March, the government designated the novel coronavirus pandemic a “historic emergency situation” in terms of archive management guidelines.

Under that designation, the first for Japan, minutes must be kept of what everyone says at meetings where policy decisions are made or approved.

But the government apparently believed the near-daily coordination council meetings were not important enough to be included under the designation for archive management.

Instead, the government decided that the task force meetings on the novel coronavirus would be covered by that designation. At those meetings, Abe simply reads out the direction of government measures.

Opposition lawmakers have argued that the task force meetings are nothing more than ceremonies, and that the real discussions and decisions are being made in the coordination council sessions.

However, at a June 11 session of the Upper House Budget Committee, Suga said the coordination council meetings do not constitute forums where policy decisions or approvals are made under the guidelines for archive management.

(This article was written by Junya Sakamoto and Amane Sugawara.)

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