Defense Minister Tomomi Inada intends to step down following a deepening data coverup scandal that has caused confusion inside her ministry and raised concern she is losing her grip on the Japanese defense forces, government sources said Thursday. The envisioned resignation of Inada, known as one of Prime Minister Shinzo…
Defense Minister Tomomi Inada intends to step down following a deepening data coverup scandal that has caused confusion inside her ministry and raised concern she is losing her grip on the Japanese defense forces, government sources said Thursday.
The envisioned resignation of Inada, known as one of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s favorites who shares his conservative views, comes even though she has denied allegations she played a role in the coverup of logs that recorded the daily activities of Japanese ground troops serving as U. N. peacekeepers in South Sudan.
The logs described particularly tense situations in the fledgling African country and their disclosure last year could have adversely affected the government’s push to continue the troop deployment and assign new, and possibly riskier, security responsibilities during the U. N. mission.
The ministry’s top bureaucrat Tetsuro Kuroe and Ground Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Gen. Toshiya Okabe also plan to resign over the scandal, according to the sources. Kuroe is reportedly said to have initiated a decision to keep from the public the fact that the GSDF had retained the logs once thought to have been discarded.
Inada left the ministry building later Thursday without commenting on whether she will quit. But media reports highlighting her alleged involvement in the scandal may have pushed her to the wall, with some officials inside the ministry seeing the media leaks as a sign of frustration piling up inside GSDF members who felt they did not want to be the only ones to be blamed for the data handling.
The 58-year-old lawyer-turned-politician took up the defense minister portfolio in the previous Cabinet reshuffle on Aug. 3 last year. Some saw her as having the potential to become Japan’s first female prime minister, but her one-year stint was marred by gaffes and missteps.
