Officials at the Osaka city government's finance bureau deliberately discarded an official document related to the recent referendum on the Osaka metropolis plan and covered up its existence in response to a request from a local assembly member, it has been learned.
The discarded document was an image of a portion of an article that had been shown to senior officials at the finance bureau by a reporter from The Mainichi Shimbun's Osaka headquarters before the story was printed. The article exposed the bureau's views on the disadvantages of the metropolis plan, which was turned down on the Nov. 1 referendum.
The city government is considering disciplining the officials involved.
The act was brought to light by Kiyoshi Higashiyama, director of the finance bureau, and other officials during a hearing on Wednesday of a special committee of the city assembly.
The top story on the front page of The Mainichi Shimbun's Oct. 26 evening edition for Osaka revealed the estimates made by the finance bureau regarding the metropolis plan. The plan called for dissolving and reorganizing Osaka City, a government ordinance-designated city, into four special wards and transferring its wide-area administration to the Osaka prefectural government. However, the estimates showed that administrative costs would increase by 21.8 billion yen a year compared to the current administrative framework. The article also noted the remarks made by an official at the bureau, who described the estimated increase as "one of the disadvantages" for the metropolis plan.
According to the city government, the Mainichi reporter emailed two images containing the first and second half of the article to Akihiro Nakamura, head of the finance section, on Oct. 25 to confirm the contents of the article. The following day, Nakamura shared hard copies of the images with Higashiyama and Harunobu Sato, head of the finance department.
However, a member of the city assembly who belongs to the regional political party Osaka Ishin no Kai, which advocated for the metropolis plan, asked for related documents to be disclosed. Higashiyama and his subordinates treated the images of the article as official documents following the city's ordinance, before discarding the image of the second half and only disclosed the first half to the city assembly member.
The retention period of official documents ranges from less than one year to 30 years, but the officials said they had not decided how long the documents in question should be saved.
When asked why they had discarded the document at Wednesday's hearing, Nakamura said he and his bosses were concerned that it "might appear as if the entire finance bureau confirmed [the Mainichi's] article and would appear as if it collaborated [with the newspaper]."
The discarding of the hard copies of the images was not initially reported to Mayor Ichiro Matsui.
"Senior officials should be held responsible," Matsui told reporters.
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