Defense Minister Tomomi Inada may be questioned over her alleged role in a suspected coverup of logs listing the daily activity of the country's ground troops during a U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, the top government spokesman said Thursday.
Inada was not supposed to be part of the internal investigation, which she ordered in March following revelations that the logs -- initially said to have been discarded by Ground Self-Defense Force members -- were actually preserved.
But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a press conference that Inada "will have to cooperate if asked" by the Defense Ministry's special inspection unit on issues recently reported by the media, such as whether she had agreed with other ministry and GSDF officials to keep from the public the fact that the "discarded" data was actually retained within the GSDF.
The ministry disclosed the activity logs in early February, claiming that while the GSDF had discarded the data, the logs were found in the computer of the Self-Defense Forces Joint Staff office.
Immediately after the announcement, the GSDF erased the data it had in its possession, apparently to comply with the ministry's official explanation, according to government sources.
The GSDF data were deleted at the instruction of a senior official of the GSDF staff office, the sources said. The official only told subordinates to "appropriately handle the data" after discounting the need to make public that the GSDF also had the data, but the subordinates took it as an order to erase them, according to the sources.
The data were deleted by the end of February. A civilian member of the Joint Staff Office is known to have told an official of the Ground Staff Office in late January that it was too late to admit that the GSDF had the data after all, according to the sources.
The Inspector General's Office of Legal Compliance, which is conducting the internal probe, is also expected to look into how SDF members handled the matter.
Inada told reporters Thursday that she hopes the results of the investigation will come out "as soon as possible."
Government sources have said that Inada met with Tetsuro Kuroe, the ministry's top bureaucrat, Gen. Toshiya Okabe, GSDF chief of staff, and others on Feb. 15 and agreed to withhold the fact that the daily logs existed at the GSDF.
It was Kuroe's wish to seek the alleged coverup and Inada approved the idea, the sources said.
Inada has denied endorsing the decision to withhold the fact that the GSDF had the daily activity logs.
The logs have drawn particular attention as firsthand information on the security situation in conflict-mired South Sudan, where Japan had deployed GSDF personnel as U.N. peacekeepers. The Defense Ministry received a request for information disclosure in October but said in December that the logs had been discarded.
The documents later turned out to have described particularly tense moments in the country. The information could have affected parliamentary debate on whether to give the GSDF members new, and possibly riskier, roles during the U.N. peacekeeping operation in line with the country's security legislation that took effect in March last year.
The Japanese government assigned the new roles to the troops in South Sudan late last year. Japan withdrew its troops from the U.N. mission at the end of May this year, saying the decision was made not because of deteriorating security conditions on the ground but because the GSDF participation over the past five years produced significant results.
