Japanese PM accused of donating to scandal-hit school

By Todd Crowell

TOKYO

The central figure in a growing scandal involving an ultra-nationalist Japanese school has defiantly repeated his assertion that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akei donated one million yen ($8,900) to the school.

The scandal involving the Moritomo Gakuan school operator presents Abe with his most serious political challenge in five years as premier and endangers his dream of becoming Japan’s longest-serving post-World War II prime minister.

In sworn testimony before both houses of parliament Thursday, the group’s head Yasunori Kagoike described how he met the premier’s wife on one of her visits and took her into a waiting room. He said Mrs. Abe asked that the person with them leave the room and then she handed over an envelope with the cash.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the government’s official spokesman, flatly denied that either the prime minister or his wife, or anyone else, had given Kagoike any such donation on his behalf.

Speaking to a crowd of reporters after finishing his parliamentary interviews, Kagoike said he wanted to give a “frank account” of the incidents that led to what has been described as Abe’s biggest crisis since he became premier five years ago.

Abe and especially his wife seem to have taken an unusually personal interest in the school.

She spoke to the assembled children several times and allowed her name to be used as honorary principal. She has since, however, removed her name from the school’s website.

Kagoike welcomed the attention of the first family and wanted to name his new elementary school the “Shinzo Abe Memorial School”, until the premier asked that the name be taken off the school.

“I had hoped to show my admiration of Abe with the name,” he said.

He said he was pleased to have all of the attention from a powerful figure who he described as sharing his “educational philosophy” -- a philosophy at the very fringe of nationalist thought.

At the elementary school that Kagoike runs, students daily repeat the Meiji era Imperial Rescript on Education, and children bow to portraits of the emperor and empress, something not done in any other school in Japan.

The second element of the growing scandal is how Kagoike managed to buy from the national government a piece of land for the new school at a steep discount. At times Kagoike has seemed confused himself of the train of events leading to the purchase.

He told assembled reporters that he originally rented the land and in the course of preparing to build the school, discovered that a lot of human garbage was in the soil that had to be dug up and replaced with fresh new soil.

He suggested that this added cost of removables was one reason why the price on the land had been discounted, not any kind of favoritism.

So far, Abe has not been linked to the murky sale and has publically stated he would resign if that connection were proved.

Kagoike said he still admires Abe -- “he’s doing a wonderful job.”

But he also declared that he had no intention of being anybody’s scapegoat.

At this point, Abe has broken no laws. He seems confident that the school operator’s mysterious purchase of land for a new school at well-below market value won’t touch him.

It cannot help Abe to being constantly associated with the school group president whose ultra-nationalist and historical revisionist views are even more pronounced than those of the prime minister, though Abe usually tries to conceal them.

The school scandal has hurt Abe’s wife, who had previously enjoyed a reputation as something of a progressive. Akie Abe supports gay rights and publicly opposed expanding nuclear power, for example.

Questions have been raised as to what she is doing accepting the position of honorary principal, and giving speeches, at a school where the vice principal sends out letters that describe Chinese and Koreans living in Japan as “wicked”.

Abe’s public approval numbers are still in the 50-percent range, although they are falling.

He enjoyed 60-percent approval soon after his recent successful trip to Washington to meet the new president.

Barring any more serious developments affecting him personally, Abe could remain premier into 2018.

He recently engineered a change in his party’s election rules to give him a third term as president of the party, a prerequisite to being premier -- which could extend his term to 2021.