Pressure mounts on Japanese minister to quit over scandal

TOKYO - Japan's defense minister is under pressure to stand down after becoming embroiled in an ongoing scandal surrounding a school operator in Osaka.

Tomomi Inada is accused of lying about her connections to Moritomo Gakuen, which is at the center of a controversial land deal with the government and was last month accused of disseminating hate speech in its curriculum.

Having initially denied any connection with the school operator, Inada made a U-turn in an apology on Tuesday, claiming she "forgot" that she had provided the school with legal advice and had represented the operator at a trial in 2004.

"If that is indeed in the court record, I would assume that I appeared instead of my husband, who was handling the case, because he could not make it," Inada, whose husband, Ryuji Inada, is also a lawyer, told a news conference on Tuesday, following a Cabinet meeting.

She also told a House of Representatives plenary session that she would "sincerely" continue to perform her role as defense minister for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

However, Hiroshi Ogushi, the main opposition Democratic Party's policy chief, accused Inada of flip-flopping and said her behavior "warrants resignation. Inada is not qualified to be defense minister".

Abe has also found himself in hot water for alleged ties to Gakuen, which was awarded substantial government subsidies to build a new school after it submitted hugely inflated estimates for construction costs.

Gakuen bought a 8,770-square-meter piece of land for $1.2 million, which is equivalent to just 14 percent of its appraisal price.

Abe has persistently said that he has no connections to the school or the land sale, despite the fact that Gakuen used his name to raise donations for the facility, which was to be built in his name, with his wife, Akie, to be its honorary president.

Akie abruptly stepped down from the role after the operator's Tsukamoto kindergarten made headlines over its nationalist curriculum and after Gakuen's president Yasunori Kagoike was accused of insulting Korean and Chinese people.

According to local media, Osaka's prefectural government may file a criminal complaint against Gakuen over the contract irregularities, although the operator has since pulled its bid to open the school.

The furor over the scandals has seen the support rate for Abe's Cabinet slump by 6 percent from a month earlier to 55.7 percent, according to a poll by Kyodo News.

Around 86.5 percent of those surveyed said the land purchase by Gakuen was "inappropriate", with the same number of people saying the government has yet to fully account for its involvement in the deal.