TOKYO, Dec. 21, 2023—It’s a familiar news video footage: Stern-faced men in dark suits enter the offices of politicians’ offices, and a few hours later they come out with cardboard boxes.
In the latest Tokyo public prosecutor swoop into the offices of the late-prime minister Shinzo Abe’s and other ruling Liberal Democratic Party faction offices, news reports said, most leading politicians, including the current PM, Kishida, have failed to book political donations in their campaign finance ledgers, using the money for private and other non-political purposes in violation of Japanese political donation law.
The prosecutors office has been fielding dozens of officers to search the LDP faction offices since earlier December, the media reported giving viewers and readers hopeful impressions that lawmaker heavyweights could be nabbed, leading to the collapse of the LDP that has been in power almost since the end of World War II in 1945.
In the what’s known as the Mori-tomo scandal surfaced in 2017, prosecutors searched 24/7 the offices that were speculated as implicated and stashing documents in secret. An official of the Ministry of Finance’s regional bureau, who whistle-blew the scandal, committed suicide, but the prosecutors stooped short of searching the key senior bureaucrat, Nobuhisa Sagawa, giving into PM Abe’s pressure.
Will the prosecutors go throughout the latest scandal, even directly searching the offices of incumbent ministers and other LDP heavyweights? It’s not likely, not because of political pressure, even though Kishida’s public support has plummeted to barely above 10 percent.
Kakuei Tanaka was the only prime minister that was arrested in post-war Japan, I July 1976 for his involvement in a bribery scandal for greasing Lockheed Corp.’s sale of Tristar commercial aircraft to All-Nippon Airways. Tanaka was arrested for violation of the Foreign Exchange Act, not for accepting bribery. He died during the trial and the case closed without court decisions.
In numerous other payoff and political campaign-finance scandals, there have been no arrest of or heavy punishment of political heavyweights. Shin Kanemaru, an LDP top lawmaker in the 1990s, who received billions of yen from donors illegally, was acquitted.
A former prosecutor in a recent television interview explained limits to how far prosecutor investigations can go.
###