Administrative organs are required to create and retain documents so that their decisions and actions can be examined later.

They must fulfill their accountability to the sovereign public to ensure fair and democratic governance.

The above are the gist of the principles and aims of the Public Records and Archives Management Law and the information disclosure law.

Under the latter law, administrative organs are also legally bound to comply with the public’s requests for information disclosure. Although the law allows some exceptions, disclosure is still mandatory, in principle, and this needs to be enforced.

In a case concerning the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, the Osaka District Court on Sept. 14 upheld the Finance Ministery’s decision against disclosure of related documents.

The plaintiff was Masako Akagi, the widow of Toshio Akagi, who committed suicide in 2018 after being forced to falsify official documents while he was at the ministry’s Kinki Local Finance Bureau.

The widow demanded that the Finance Ministry and the bureau disclose all the documents it had submitted to prosecutors, but her demand was rejected and she took the case to court.

The information disclosure law says that exceptions to the rule can be made if disclosing information to the public may have a negative effect on crime prevention or interfere with an ongoing investigation. In such cases, the law allows administrative organs to exercise a certain degree of discretionary power.

In its Sept. 14 ruling, the Osaka court stated, “We cannot say there is no danger of methods and the scope of subjects on the investigation as well as investigators’ interest becoming known (if information is disclosed to the public).”

And the court maintained there was no abuse of discretionary power on the part of the Finance Ministry.

We cannot believe this.

The attorneys representing Akagi pointed out to the court that the documents their client was demanding to see were not records of something such as depositions or statements taken by investigative authorities, but the Finance Ministry’s administrative documents.

And such official documents are meant for wide public disclosure, the attorneys maintained, and criticized the court for “giving the administrative organ an overly broad discretionary power and failing to understand the spirit of the information disclosure law.”

We completely agree.

And let us not forget that it is the government itself that needs to recall the fact that the information disclosure law calls for “disclosure as a rule.”

Throughout the Moritomo Gakuen scandal, the Finance Ministry was at the center of repetitive and widespread governmental efforts at what can only be called deliberate “concealment.”

When Akagi sued the government for damages after her husband’s suicide, the government abruptly made a cognovit, or acknowledged the plaintiff’s entire claim, ending the court proceedings before any hearings could take place.

Although the trial led to the disclosure of the “Akagi File” that was compiled by the deceased before he took his own life, the disclosure was made only at the urging of the court.

Apart from Masako Akagi, a university professor has been requesting the disclosure of related Finance Ministry documents, only to be turned down most of the time. Multiple court decisions have been handed down to date, determining the ministry’s nondisclosure to be illegal.

There are still many unanswered questions about the Moritomo scandal. For one, what led to the sale of government-owned land at a price that was as much as 800 million yen ($5.4 million) below the assessed value?

Another remains about the falsifications of Finance Ministry documents that began after then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Diet in 2017 that he would “step down both as prime minister and as a lawmaker” if he or his wife, Akie, were ever to be found involved in the case.

Was there anyone else who was deeply involved in the falsifications other than Nobuhisa Sagawa, then director-general of the ministry’s Financial Bureau, who “set the overall direction for the falsifications” according to an intraministry probe?

A recurrence of a scandal like this can be prevented only if the entire truth is brought to light. And for that, a full disclosure of all pertinent documents is indispensable.

The ministry owes that not only to Akagi who keeps trying to “know the truth,” but also to the entire Japanese population.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 20