EDITORIAL: Aso must go, even though Diet rejected motions against him

A no-confidence motion and a censure motion against Finance Minister Taro Aso, who also doubles as minister in charge of financial services, were voted down on June 21 during a plenary session of the Lower House and the Upper House, respectively.

Members of the opposition, including from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Democratic Party for the People, had submitted the motions to the respective chambers of the Diet. The motions were rejected by a majority of votes, including by members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, its junior coalition partner, Komeito, and Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party).

The Asahi Shimbun in its editorials has repeatedly called on Aso to step down, partly because of the inappropriate way he responded to the Finance Ministry’s falsification of official documents and allegations of sexual harassment by Junichi Fukuda, administrative vice finance minister at the time.

“Whenever there is a problem with the executive branch of government, the legislative branch has a duty to set it right,” an opposition member emphasized in a speech on June 21 during the Upper House plenary session, but the ruling parties used the weight of their numbers to snub the motion.

Given the circumstances, the only thing voters can do is to use their ballots in the upcoming Upper House election to deliver a verdict on the situation, including the stance of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who continues to defend Aso and allows him to remain in his post.

The immediate trigger for the opposition’s motions was the recent development wherein Aso refused to accept the report of a panel of the Financial Services Agency, which said pension benefits could fall 20 million yen ($186,000) short of the required post-retirement living expenses for a typical elderly couple.

The opposition criticizes Aso for committing a “rash act of an unheard-of scale” by asking the panel to discuss the matter in the name of a government office but refusing to take its report just because he didn’t like what was written on it.

This is by no means the first time that Aso’s speech and behavior showed that he is less than qualified to serve in the Cabinet. The most momentous of all is the way he dealt with the Finance Ministry’s rigging of its official documents.

The ministry created an unprecedented scandal when it was disclosed it had systematically doctored documents on the sale of state-owned land to school operator Moritomo Gakuen, where Akie Abe, the prime minister’s wife, served as honorary principal for some time.

But the Finance Ministry only made a half-hearted probe into the case. It never elucidated the core question of why a discount of 800 million yen was given in the first place and attempted to end the case by punishing officials, including Nobuhisa Sagawa, who was director-general of the ministry’s Financial Bureau when the documents were falsified.

The Financial Bureau oversees state-owned assets.

Aso, who later promoted Sagawa to the post of commissioner of the National Tax Agency, insisted that Sagawa had been the “right person in the right place.”

Aso did return his salary as a Cabinet minister, but he never took political responsibility and continued to serve as finance minister.

When allegations were made that Fukuda had sexually harassed a female reporter, Aso made a succession of remarks to defend Fukuda and even turned defiant.

“There is no crime called sexual harassment,” he said on several occasions.

During a speech of rebuttal to the opposition’s censure motion, an LDP lawmaker said in Aso’s defense that, following the revelation of the falsification of official documents, Aso has been “making efforts to change the awareness of workers across, and recover public trust in, the Finance Ministry.”

It appears, however, that Aso is the very person that continues to harm public trust not just in the Finance Ministry but in the entire public administration system at large.

In a separate, and all too timely, development, it has been learned that passages had been deleted from a draft of a recommendation that the Fiscal System Council, an advisory panel to the finance minister, submitted to Aso on June 19.

“The levels of pension benefits are expected in the future to be lower than assumed,” one of the deleted passages said. “It is essential to call for self-help efforts,” said another.

How precisely they were deleted has yet to be learned, but Aso will have to bear even more responsibility if members of the council and its secretarial workers were trying to curry favor with his assumed desires and intentions.

--The Asahi Shimbun, June 22