Photo/Illutration Yosuke Isozaki, left, shakes hands with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after being appointed a special adviser for national security in January 2014. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

A former top aide to then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has admitted to lobbying telecommunications ministry officials to change the method for judging the political fairness of broadcasters.

Yosuke Isozaki said in response to questions from The Asahi Shimbun, “It is a fact that when I served as special adviser to the prime minister, I exchanged views with high-ranking ministry officials about the interpretation regarding political fairness as spelled out in the Broadcasting Law that led to a supplementary explanation” about the method. 

Isozaki served as Abe’s special adviser from December 2012 after winning a first term in the Upper House in 2007. He was defeated in the 2019 election.

Isozaki’s name popped up in a document Hiroyuki Konishi, an Upper House member with the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, claims shows how the prime minister’s office during Abe’s administration exchanged views with the telecommunications ministry on revising the political fairness interpretation.

While the ministry has long assessed the fairness in programming by a broadcaster by the entirety of its work, the document said top aides to Abe wanted to use a single program. 

But while Isozaki admitted to lobbying for the interpretation change, he stopped short of verifying the individual comments attributed to him in the document on the grounds that he could not recall such details.

The document has Isozaki telling senior ministry officials, “This is a matter that will be decided by me and the prime minister alone.”

Konishi appeared at the March 3 Upper House Budget Committee session and asked that the document he said he obtained from a ministry bureaucrat be distributed to committee members.

But ruling coalition members refused because they held doubts about the authenticity of the document.

Takeaki Matsumoto, the internal affairs minister, said he was asking subordinates to continue looking into how the document came to be compiled and the accuracy of its contents.

Konishi asked Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the committee session his take on what the document described, but Kishida repeatedly said, “I cannot comment on a document with questionable accuracy and legitimacy.”

But one Cabinet minister who did not hesitate in denouncing Konishi’s document as a “fabrication” was Sanae Takaichi, the state minister in charge of economic security. Her name appeared in the document because she was telecommunications minister at the time.

She said the quotes attributed to her “were clearly made up with an evil intent.” She said a reported telephone exchange between herself and Abe never took place.

When Konishi asked Takaichi if she would resign as a Diet member if the document turned out not to be fabricated, she said yes.

(This article was written by Hisashi Ishimatsu and Ryutaro Abe.)

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