Ministry excluded panel discussion records from freedom of information request

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications denied the existence of transcripts of discussions at a ministry-organized research panel in response to a freedom of information request from the Mainichi Shimbun, even though the records existed, documents obtained from people linked to the panel show.

The panel discussed forms of legislature for small-scale municipalities. One such local body is the village of Okawa in Kochi Prefecture in western Japan, which considered replacing the elected village assembly with a general council of all registered voters due to the difficulty recruiting candidate legislators amid depopulation and aging.

Records of the panel's discussions indicate that a senior ministry official negative about the general council got deeply involved in the exchange at the panel.

The findings shed light on the reality in which documents covering a policy-making process were removed from the public's view for the sake of the government.

The research panel consisted of eight experts and had seven closed-door meetings from July 2017 through March 2018. The internal affairs ministry posted outlines of panel deliberations, including remarks not attributed to specific speakers.

Based on an assumption that transcripts from which the posted records were extracted should exist, the Mainichi Shimbun filed a freedom of information request with the ministry, specifically asking for "all transcripts (not outlines of deliberations, but those recording the names of speakers and their remarks)."

The ministry's response dated May 1 said that it did not make or acquire such transcripts and was not in possession of them.

In actual fact, however, the ministry's Local Administration Division under the Local Administration Bureau, which served as the secretariat for the panel, made documents recording the remarks of panel members for each and every meeting.

The records obtained by the Mainichi after the ministry denied the possession of panel deliberation transcripts showed the names of speakers and their respective remarks. The records state that Shigetaka Yamasaki, head of the Local Administration Bureau, who attended the meetings as an "organizer," played a leading role in the discussions, presenting his negative view about the general council of all registered voters replacing municipal assemblies with elected members.

The documents' existence was acknowledged by Hiromi Yoshikawa, chief of the Local Administration Division and Yamasaki's subordinate. But Yoshikawa said, "They are unofficial transcripts without confirmation from a superior. That is why we answered (to the Mainichi freedom of information request) that we did not make records (of the panel's discussions). We hired a professional transcriber to create them, but it is a memo for individual officials, and therefore, not an official document." Meanwhile, Yoshikawa acknowledged that his division's deputy director, who was not among officials in charge of the panel, saw the documents.

The Act on Access to Information Held by Administrative Organs, and the Public Records and Archives Management Act, define public documents as "documents that are prepared or obtained by an employee of an Administrative Organ in the course of their duties, or held by the Administrative Organ concerned for organizational use by its employees."

Yoshihiro Katayama, a Waseda University Graduate School of Public Management professor, says the documents in question are official "because a government office in its official capacity transcribed the recordings." Katayama, who had served as a former official of the Ministry of Home Affairs (the predecessor of the internal affairs ministry) before being elected as the governor of Tottori Prefecture, added that the ministry was "selfish" for not disclosing the details of the research panel's discussions despite the fact that it used taxpayers' money to pay for the panel members and transcribing. "They must disclose at least the transcripts," he said.

(Japanese original by Satoshi Kusakabe, General Digital News Center)