Photo/Illutration The Japan Post Group headquarters in Tokyo’s Otemachi district (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Post offices nationwide lost documents containing the personal information of about 290,000 customers, including many who bought financial products, Japan Post Co. and Japan Post Bank Co. said on Dec. 15.

Around 30 percent of post offices in Japan were involved in the losses, the companies said. The records contained customers’ names, bank account numbers and other information.

Auxiliary books, which keep records on transactions for investment trust funds and government bonds, were among the missing documents.

Japan Post and Japan Post Bank said they believe the information was not likely leaked outside.

They reported the matter to the internal affairs ministry and the Financial Services Agency the same day.

The Financial Instruments and Exchange Law requires those documents to be kept for seven years. The companies’ internal rules stipulate that they should be retained for 10 years.

An in-house investigation that started in December last year found that 6,389 post offices lost information on 148,000 customers.

The data for 26,000 of them were not kept as required under the law.

The investigation also revealed that 176 post offices lost records of payments made by about 142,000 customers.

The companies said many of the documents were apparently discarded by mistake.

Japan Post determined that the top management at the company head office bears a heavy responsibility for the matter and has severely reprimanded three executives in charge.

The company pledged to prevent a recurrence. It said that in June it started keeping such records in digital format, instead of on paper, as much as possible.

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