Editorial

The former chief of the Foreign Ministry's treaties bureau, Kazuhiko Togo, in his testimony to the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs on Friday about the secret Japan-U.S. pact regarding revisions of the Japan-U.S. security arrangement and the reversion of Okinawa, raised the possibility that some related documents may have been destroyed.

It had already been pointed out by a panel of experts rounded up by the Foreign Ministry that there were unnatural gaps in the existing documents pertaining to the secret pact, but Friday marked the first time that a former senior Foreign Ministry official offered such testimony to the Diet.

If the destruction of such documents was conducted intentionally in order to cover up the existence of a secret agreement ahead of the 2001 implementation of the information disclosure law, this indicates a major scandal. Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada must work quickly to uncover the events that led up to the documents' disappearance, and pinpoint where responsibility lies.

As chief of the treaties bureau, Togo said he not only compiled 58 documents related to port calls by U.S. vessels carrying nuclear weapons into five files, handing them over to his successor, Shotaro Yachi, after marking the 16 most important documents with double circles, but he also put them in an envelope and mailed them to Ichiro Fujisaki, currently the Japanese Ambassador to the United States.

However, among the documents disclosed in the final report by the panel that investigated the case, there were only eight of the 16 double-circled documents.

"I heard from a person said to have a lot of inside information on the Foreign Ministry at the time that related documents were destroyed," Togo said in his testimony. "Not all the documents that I compiled are there. I would like to request that the Foreign Ministry follow up on this."

Among the documents that Togo said are missing are the minutes from a meeting that took place on Jan. 20, 1960, between the then head of the Foreign Ministry's treaty bureau and U.S. government officials. "I recall that it said something to the effect that the U.S. claimed that "the introduction of nuclear weapons in the country" refers only to weapons brought onto land, and that in line with rules of nuclear deployment, the U.S. would neither confirm nor deny the existence of such weapons in territorial waters."

This testimony is crucial. If such remarks were indeed made by U.S. officials at the meeting, the agreement to conduct "prior consultation" in the case that the U.S. wanted vessels carrying nuclear weapons to pass through or make port calls in Japan had no real significance. This makes it even more important that a thorough investigation is conducted on the documents' disappearance.

Meanwhile, former Mainichi reporter Takichi Nishiyama says that Japan's agreement to shoulder the 4 million dollars it took to restore land that had been used by the U.S. military to its original state before Okinawa was reverted back to Japan "can be considered a type of secret agreement."

The Ministry of Finance has revealed that Japan made an interest-free deposit to the U.S. in the past, but that is just one small part of the murky financial burdens that Japan shouldered when Okinawa was returned from the U.S.

Nishiyama says that the 65 million dollars in U.S. military facility improvement costs -- which were agreed upon outside the conditions of the bilateral agreement and did not even undergo Diet deliberations -- comprises the origins of the "omoiyari yosan" (sympathy budget) that Japan pays the U.S. military today, and is in fact the "biggest secret pact."

What we seek now is for the Diet to make the efforts necessary to compensate for the gaps seen in the government's investigation process.