Photo/Illutration Jun Sawada, president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., answers questions from an opposition lawmaker about his dinners with telecommunications ministry officials at the Upper House Budget Committee on March 15. (Reina Kitamura)

The steady drip of information fueling the scandal of bureaucrats being wined and dined by industry stakeholders is showing no signs of slowing.

It continued again on March 15, when the telecommunications ministry said two top officials dined in 2018 with the president of telecommunication giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., a major industry player under the ministry’s purview.

The two officials are Yoshinori Akimoto and Shigeki Suzuki, officials said.

At the time, Akimoto was the director-general of the Telecommunications Business Department of the Telecommunications Bureau, while Suzuki was vice minister for policy coordination.

Suzuki later assumed the highest-ranking post for a bureaucrat in the ministry.

The two dined with NTT President Jun Sawada, a prominent stakeholder, on Nov. 8, 2018.

The dinner in question cost 26,487 yen ($245) per person. Akimoto and Suzuki did not pay for the meal.

The ministry said it learned about the dinner after NTT reported it to them. Akimoto, who is still with the ministry, acknowledges that the dinner took place.

Appearing at a March 15 session of the Upper House Budget Committee, Sawada apologized for causing trouble and concern with the dinners.

He described dinners with bureaucrats and ministers as a setting where they could “exchange views about society at large.”

He denied asking for business favors.

The ministry is expected to investigate 144 current officials who have held key jobs, including division head posts and higher in the telecommunications area, as well as those who worked for the Minister’s Secretariat, over whether they had dinner with NTT and other players in the telecommunications industry and whether they paid for their own meals.

Meanwhile, the president of Tohokushinsha Film Corp. addressed another matter plaguing its company: one of its channel licenses getting pulled over breach of foreign ownership rules.

Shinya Nakajima told the committee that the company reported to the ministry in early August 2017 over its ratio of foreign shareholders exceeding the legal limit.

“We met with a ministry official around Aug. 9, 2017, and reported that to them,” Nakajima said on March 15.

Nakajima said his company became aware that it was in violation of the Broadcast Law on Aug. 4, 2017, about half a year after it received a license to broadcast a satellite channel from the ministry.

Tohokushinsha passed the license to a new subsidiary established in September, attempting to resolve the problem.

“We believed that having the subsidiary take over the license would fix the problem,” he said. “So, we proposed the idea when we met the ministry official.”

Nakajima said the official they met with was the chief of the General Affairs Division of the ministry’s Information and Communications Bureau.

But the ministry denies Nakajima’s assertion.

Hiroshi Yoshida, the director-general of the bureau, hit back that the person who was division chief at the time “said they have no recollection of getting such a report” from Tohokushinsha officials.

Yoshida said no documents or memos exist regarding Tohokushinsha’s claim.

Under the Broadcast Law, a broadcasting company with foreign shareholders representing 20 percent or more of the voting rights is not allowed to operate in Japan.

After the scandal broke, the ministry asked the company again about the ratio. The ministry then determined that it was actually 20.75 percent, on the basis of voting power--exceeding the limit under the law.

Tohokushinsha has come under scrutiny over a series of dinners involving Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s eldest son, an employee of the company, and top ministry officials.

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