Moritomo Gakuen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gakkō Hōjin Moritomo Gakuen
学校 法人 森 友 学園
legal form Gakkō Hōjin ( Independent School Owner )
founding March 18, 1971
Seat Osaka , JapanJapanJapan 
management Chinami Kagoike
Branch Education
Website www.tukamotoyouchien.ed.jp
www.mizuhonokuni.ed.jp ( Memento of March 8, 2017 in the Internet Archive )

The Gakkō Hōjin Moritomo Gakuen ( Japanese 学校 法人 森 友 学園 ; short 森 友 学園 Moritomo Gakuen ) is a freelance school provider based in Osaka in Osaka Prefecture in western Japan and currently runs a kindergarten ( Yōchien ) there. It first gained national notoriety in early 2017 in connection with allegations of corruption involving Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and the Ministry of Finance .

history

Tsukamoto Kindergarten

On April 1, 1950, the educator Hiroshi Moritomo ( 森 友 寛 Moritomo Hiroshi ; 1926–1995) submitted an application to the Osaka prefectural administration to establish the "Tsukamoto Kindergarten" ( 塚 本 幼稚園 Tsukamoto Yōchien ; today officially 塚 本 幼稚園 幼 児 教育 学園 Tsukamoto Yōchien Kyōiku Gakuen , German about "Tsukamoto Kindergarten Educational Academy for Toddlers"), which was approved on August 25 of the year. On March 18, 1971, the Gakkō Hōjin Moritomo Gakuen was founded , so that the kindergarten was now part of a public corporation.

Yasunori Kagoike ( 籠 池 泰 典 Kagoike Yasunori ), who headed the kindergarten from 1986 to 2017 and is a member of the Nippon Kaigi , mainly represents ultranationalist (according to his own statement, patriotic ) teaching and upbringing methods based on the Imperial Edict of Education of 1890 and had them on the Transfer the program of the kindergarten. The basic principles include the veneration of the imperial house and deification of the emperor as well as other aspects of state Shinto .

Planned primary school

Drawing of the planned "Mizuho-no-Kuni Memorial Basic Academy" (September 2015)

Moritomo Gakuen also planned to open a private primary school in April 2017, which, like the Tsukamoto Kindergarten, should pursue patriosm as a basic educational method. After initially planning to call it “Shinzō Abe Memorial Primary School” ( 安 倍 晋 三 記念 小学校 Abe Shinzō Kinen Shōgakkō ), Kagoike later decided on “Mizuho-no-Kuni Memorial Primary Academy” ( 瑞 穂 の 國 記念 小學院 Mizuho no Kuni Kinen Shogakuin ). The term "Mizuho no Kuni" is the abbreviation of the mythological name of Japan Toyo-ashi-hara no chi-aki no naga-i-ho-aki no mizu-ho no kuni ( 豐 葦 原 之 千秋 長 五百 秋 之 水 穗 國 , dt. "Land of the lush reeds, 1000 autumns, long 500 autumns and the fertile ears of rice") from the Kojiki or Toyo-ashi-hara no chi-i-ho-aki no mizu-ho no kuni ( 豐 葦 原 千 五百秋 瑞 穂 之 地 , dt. "Land of the lush reeds, the 1500 autumns and the fertile ears of rice") from the newer Nihonshoki ; Abe himself had rejected the previous school name based on Prime Minister Shinzō Abe . He first emphasized that it should only be used after his term as prime minister and later corrected this statement by postponing its use until after his death.

Suspected corruption

The construction of the Mizuho-no-Kuni Memorial Basic Academy and its circumstances sparked a national controversy that has since led to a drastic decline in the popularity of Prime Minister Abe's cabinet. Since the Ministry of Finance became aware of the forgery of public documents on March 12, 2018, the approval ratings of the cabinet fell again. The Japanese Court of Auditors published its final report on the property sale in November 2018, but could not determine the cause of the low price. In addition, the government was not involved in the forgery of documents by the Ministry of Finance.

Land purchase

In September 2013, Kagoike applied for the first time to the “ Kinkis Office for Financial Affairs ” ( 近畿 財務 局Kinki zaimu-kyoku ), which is subordinate to the Ministry of Finance , to purchase a 8,770 m² state property in Toyonaka and was unable to assert himself because he lacked the financial means. In October 2014, an application followed to establish a primary school in the area of Osaka prefecture , which was approved by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) in September 2015 together with a specific permit plan . Previously, Kagoike had been able to enforce a lease for the property in May, provided that it was fully acquired within 10 years. After construction work began in December 2015, Moritomo Gakuen informed the Kinkis Financial Affairs Office in March 2016 about the harmful waste found on the property floor and at the same time expressed interest in buying the property immediately. The following June, both sides signed a purchase agreement, the price of which already took into account the costs incurred to clean up the soil. The land price was about ¥ 956 million  and the cleaning costs were officially ¥ 820 million; they finally agreed on a purchase price of ¥ 134 million (the equivalent of around € 1 million , exchange  rate from February 2018). These amounts had initially been kept secret and were only released after a lawsuit filed by a member of Toyonaka City Council on February 8, 2017 and critical press reports. Akie Abe , the Prime Minister's wife, was to serve as Honorary Director of the school and was already listed as such on the school website.

The almost completed school building in March 2017

On February 9, 2017, the Asahi Shimbun reported for the first time that the purchase price had been kept secret and demanded that it be disclosed, which followed the next day. On February 27, the land sale was discussed in a meeting of the Budget Committee of the Lower House of the National Parliament , and Prime Minister Abe denounced the sale and educational methods of the Tsukamoto Kindergarten as inappropriate. At the same time, he denied any links between him and the activities of the kindergarten and land sales announced that his wife had resigned as honorary director of the school. He affirmed his own resignation as prime minister should investigations reveal that he or his wife played an active role in the property sale. Nobuhisa Sagawa ( 佐川 宣 寿 ), the head of the finance bureau, which is generally responsible for the state domain , also denied any form of possible corruption and claimed that all documents related to the purchase had already been destroyed and could therefore not confirm this claim; all digital documents are also automatically deleted after a certain period of time and are therefore no longer available. On March 12, the building permit for the elementary school was withdrawn on the grounds that the intentions of the construction were inadequate and the property was returned to the state.

Alleged donations

In a questioning of members of the House of Lords Committee on Budgets on March 16, Kagoike claimed that he had received a donation of ¥ 1 million (about € 7,600, February 2018 rate) from Akie Abe on behalf of Shinzō Abe in September 2015. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga denied this statement on the same day and stated that neither of the two Abes had donated. Contrary to this, Moritomo Gakuen published on March 18 as evidence of the donation a transfer receipt of a cash deposit on their current account , which at first glance says "Moritomo Gakuen" on the name field of the person making the transfer, but on closer inspection the name " Shinzō Abe ”appears. According to his own statement, Kagoike tried to truthfully identify Abe as the payer, but had to change his name afterwards due to bank-internal regulations, according to which the name of the transferor must match that of the account holder. On March 23, Kagoike said under oath during a witness questioning in parliament that he had received the ¥ 1 million in cash in an envelope from Akie Abe on September 5, 2015 when she was attending Tsukamoto Kindergarten. Akie Abe's visits were proven by means of image and video recordings, and recordings were published on the website akie-leaks.com , which was set up especially for the case , in which Akie praised the ultra-nationalist educational methods of the kindergarten and says that her husband shares the same view be. Kagoike also stated that Akie had advised him on the property lease and contacted the Treasury Department by fax, so that the ministry “concluded” that Prime Minister Abe's wish was to minimize the purchase price. In this context, Kagoike used the term “Sontaku” ( 忖度 ) several times , which had hardly been used in everyday Japanese until then and which roughly means “conclusion” or “assumption”. In this case, it was meant to say that the officials suspected the prime minister's intention and acted accordingly. It should be noted that the Prime Minister's control over personnel decisions within the ministries and offices under Abe increased significantly with the establishment of the “Cabinet Personnel Office” in May 2014.

The approval (blue) and rejection rate (red) for Prime Minister Abe's cabinets since 2013. From the onset of the Moritomo problem in February / March 2017, a clear deterioration in Abe's voice can be seen.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party ( LDP for short ), whose chairman is Shinzō Abe, denied Kagoike's statements and accused him of breaking the oath. I.a. she justified this with the fact that Kagoike had claimed in parliament that he had left Akie Abes a voice message on the phone regarding the donation, which she denied herself. On March 28, several LDP members announced that Kagoike's statements about the transfer receipt were allegedly incorrect because the handwriting was more like that of his wife Junko. Kagoike and his wife Junko are since July 2017 because of subsidy fraud in custody . They are accused of providing false information about the construction costs of the school building and of falsifying the payroll of the Tsukamoto kindergarten from 2011 to 2016. The management of the Moritomo Gakuen took over her eldest daughter Chinami.

Ministry of Finance misconduct

In September 2017, a sound recording of a conversation between Yasunori and Junko Kagoike, an attorney for Moritomo Gakuen, a member of the Kinkis Bureau of Financial Affairs and an employee of the construction company from March 2016, was released, in which the parties agreed that the costs of removal of the garbage found would be around ¥ 800 million. The tax officer assures the Kagoikes that the purchase price will be reduced “to zero” as desired, but that one cannot go below 132 million yen because this is the cost of removing part of the garbage in 2015. During a meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Commons in November 2017, the Director General of the Ministry of Finance confirmed the authenticity of this recording and at the same time noted that it was only part of the conversation and denied such a determination of the purchase price. In the same month, a parliamentary committee of inquiry found that the large discount was inadequate, despite the waste, and that the clean-up would not result in such high costs. In January 2018, several documents from the Kinkis Tax Office came to light, even though Sagawa, then General Manager, had denied the existence of any documents relating to the property sale. These 40-page documents contained internal consultations on how to deal with the waste found and it therefore appeared as if these papers were not directly related to the sale. They were then submitted to Parliament in this form. In February 2018, a member of the House of Commons for the Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) released a full audio recording of the conversation, in which the Moritomo attorney asked the tax official to keep the price below ¥ 150 million. The Ministry of Finance then again denied any connection to the final purchase price.

On March 2, 2018, the Asahi Shimbun reported, citing anonymous sources, that the documents that had been made public and presented to parliament had been forged after the Moritomo problem emerged. After the MLIT reported the suspicion of a falsification of public documents relating to the Moritomo problem to the cabinet secretariat , the allegedly original documents were submitted to the Treasury Department and a thorough investigation of the incident was requested. On March 7, an official from the Kinkis Tax Office who was involved in the property sale to Moritomo Gakuen was found dead in his home; the police assumed a suicide. In his suicide note, the officer wrote that he had been forced "from above" to forge several documents and that he was afraid of taking responsibility for them. On March 9, the "head of the national tax office" ( 国税 庁 長官kokuzeichō-chōkan ) Nobuhisa Sagawa, who was "head of the finance office" ( 理財 局長rizai-kyoku-chō ) when the suspicious sale first became known, resigned from his current post back and stated that he wanted to take responsibility for the discussions and ambiguities caused by him.

On March 12, the Ministry of Finance confirmed the forgery of 14 documents with a total of 78 A4 pages in Parliament and presented the original versions. As a result, it emerged that reports of several visits by Akie Abe to the Tsukamoto Kindergarten and conversations with Yasunori Kagoike, connections to the nationalist Nippon Kaigi and the names of several politicians, including B. Shinzō Abe or Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Tarō Asō , had been removed. The opposition parties then demanded at least the resignation of Finance Minister Asō and not infrequently the entire cabinet. Asō and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga denied any allegations and asserted that Sagawa was fully responsible for the forgery of the documents. In order to strengthen their suspicion of government interference in the forgery of documents and thus in the land sale process, the opposition applied for an oath to be heard by the parliament and, after the LDP's initial rejection, was able to prevail on March 20. The approval ratings of Abe's cabinet had previously dropped to just over 30% in some polls and reached their lowest level since 2012. On March 27, Sagawa was finally asked by MPs from all political groups about the reasons and intentions of the forgery; However, he left many essential questions such as the causes and intentions of the forgery, pointing to possible criminal prosecution, uncommented and claimed that he alone had ordered the forgery and that the government had no influence on his decisions.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Japan auditors release Moritomo Gakuen report but fail to answer why land was sold so cheap. In: The Japan Times . November 22, 2018, accessed November 24, 2018 .
  2. ↑ 学校 法人 に 大阪 の 国有 地 売 却 価 格 非公 表 、 近隣 の １ 割 か . In: Asahi Shimbun . February 9, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  3. ↑ 森 友 と の 交 渉 記録 、 デ ー タ 復 元 の 可能性 財務 省 認 め る . In: Asahi Shimbun . April 10, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  4. ↑ 森 友 へ の 補助 金 ５６５０ 万 円 、 国 交 省 が 返還 請求 へ . In: Asahi Shimbun . March 13, 2017, Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  5. ↑ 昭 恵 夫人 が １００ 万 円 の 寄 付 否定 . In: Mainichi Shimbun . March 17, 2017, Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  6. ↑ 「寄 付 金 記録」 学園 側 が 提示 . In: Mainichi Shimbun . March 18, 2017, Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  7. ↑ 籠 池 氏 「九 分 九 厘 で は し ご 外 さ れ た」 参 院 院 の 喚 問 終了 . In: Asahi Shimbun . March 23, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  8. ↑ akie-leaks.com
  9. ↑ Japan school scandal deepens as key figure names names. In: Nikkei Asian Review . March 24, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Sontaku and Tokusai - two words have a career in Japan. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 6, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  11. ^ Abe moves to boost control of bureaucrats. In: The Japan Times . May 27, 2014, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  12. ↑ 自民党籠池氏虚偽暴露会見詳報(1)西村康稔総裁特別補佐「100万円の「安倍晋三」振込用紙,郵便局に持って行ったのは職員でなく籠池氏妻では」 . In: Sankei Shimbun . March 28, 2017, Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  13. ↑ Kagoikes arrested over alleged subsidy fraud Involving Moritomo Gakuen schools plugged by Abe's wife. In: The Japan Times . July 31, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  14. ^ Investigation shifts to ministry in Moritomo land scandal. In: The Asahi Shimbun . September 12, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  15. ↑ 財務 省 、 新 た な 録音 認 め る 「口裏 合 わ せ」 否定 . In: Mainichi Shimbun . November 28, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  16. ^ Board of Audit disputes volume of waste on plot sold to Moritomo. In: The Asahi Shimbun . November 23, 2017, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Tax-filing season starts with a bang as Moritomo protests hit agency branches nationwide. In: The Japan Times . February 17, 2018, accessed February 18, 2018 .
  18. ↑ 森 友 学園 、 希望 額 提示 か ＝ 共産 が 音 声 デ ー タ 公開 . In: Jiji Tsūshinsha . February 15, 2018, accessed February 18, 2018 (Japanese).
  19. ↑ 森 友 文書 、 財務 省 が 書 き 換 え か 「特例」 な ど 文言 消 え る . In: Asahi Shimbun . March 2, 2018, Retrieved March 27, 2018 (Japanese).
  20. ↑ 財務 省 局長 「佐川 氏 は 改 竄 知 っ て い た」 野 党 が 審議 復活 、 国会 で 追 及 . In: Sankei Shimbun . March 17, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 (Japanese).
  21. ↑ Abe's scandal Moritomo miseries. In: East Asia Forum . March 26, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  22. ↑ Tax agency chief Sagawa steps down over land sale controversy. In: Kyodo News . March 9, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  23. ↑ 《3 分 で わ か る》 財務 省 が 「書 き 換 え た」 森 友 文書 、 4 つ の 要点 は こ れ だ 。1 ペ ー ジ 丸 ご と 削除 も… . In: The Huffington Post . March 13, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2018 (Japanese).
  24. ↑ 野 党 、 麻 生 氏 の 辞 任 要求 へ 森 友 問題 「国会 の 信 頼 覆 す」 . In: Nihon Keizai Shimbun . March 12, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2018 (Japanese).
  25. ↑ Sagawa to testify in Diet on March 27 over falsified files. In: Asahi Shimbun . March 20, 2018, accessed March 27, 2018 .
  26. ↑ Sagawa Repeatedly dodges Diet questions, citing possible prosecution. In: Asahi Shimbun . March 27, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2018 (Japanese).

Web links