It has been revealed that the memoirs of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which is about to be published on the 8th, contain details about Moritomo Academy corruption and visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.
On the 6th, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the memoir included a part that former Prime Minister Abe suspected of the Moritomo Gakuen corruption as “a strategy by the Ministry of Finance to hold me back.”
The Moritomo Academy corruption that occurred in 2017 was Prime Minister Abe’s Achilles’ heel. Suspicion that the Prime Minister sold the site of an elementary school at a bargain price to an aide who runs a private school has reduced the approval rating of the Cabinet to the 20% level.
Toshio Akagi, an employee of the Ministry of Finance, who was mobilized to fabricate documents denying the Prime Minister’s involvement at the time, made an extreme choice by leaving a memo saying, “The documents were fabricated at the direction of the Ministry of Finance.”
Later, the bereaved family released a transcript containing the details of the sale of the state land and the manipulation by the key person in the Ministry of Finance who urged the manipulation of the document.
Screen capture of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s memoir to be published on the 8th (Source: Amazon Japan)According to newspaper reports, former Prime Minister Abe is in a position of regret over Moritomo’s corruption.
The former prime minister denied any relationship, saying, “I was confident that I was innocent because I had never met the person named Kagoike Yasunori Academy.”
Rather, the former Prime Minister is in the position that the Ministry of Finance was silent about corruption in order to bring him down. In 2014, before the Moritomo Gakuen corruption scandal broke out, he fought a war of nerves over whether to delay the increase in the consumption tax with the Ministry of Finance.
‘The Treasury Department must have known that the land deal was a serious problem at first,’ he replied, ‘but the record of the land deal negotiations was not passed on to me.’ “There were many parts that I first learned about the Moritomo issue through media reports,” he explained. In effect, the ball was passed to the Treasury.
Similar to Moritomo Gakuen, attention is being paid to whether the issue of Kake Gakuen, where the issue of unfair support for aides, will also be mentioned in the memoir.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe enters the Yasukuni Shrine for worship ⓒ AFP=News1The memoir also contains former Prime Minister Abe’s impressions of visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, where World War II Class A war criminals are buried.
The former Prime Minister expressed that it was a ‘road to go through once’ about the shrine visit during his tenure. He said in a relieved tone, ‘I did my job’, but immediately gave up after the US government announced that it was unusually ‘disappointed’. ‘Two times during his tenure, I felt like I couldn’t do it,’ he recalled.
The memoir (中央公論新社) was written based on a total of 18 interviews conducted for 36 hours by Goro Hashimoto (橋本五?), special editor of the Yomiuri Shimbun, between October 2020 and October 2021 after the resignation of former Prime Minister Abe. done.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.