TOKYO, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Masatsugu Asakawa, the top currency diplomat at the Japanese Finance Ministry, will be appointed as finance minister, the highest bureaucratic post, amid a string of scandals leading to his predecessor Junichi Fukuda stepping down, government sources said Sunday.
Vice finance ministers in Japan are usually succeeded by individuals from the Budget Bureau, but owing to the current chief Shigeaki Okamoto's proximity to a document tampering scandal involving doctored papers related to the shady sale of state land to a controversial nationalist school operator, Okamoto was not offered the position.
Amid bedlam at the Finance Ministry caused by its involvement in document tampering connected to a protracted cronyism scandal implicating Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, Akie, Asakawa, 60, a close aide of Finance Minister Taro Aso when the latter served as prime minister, was tapped for the position as the ministry's top bureaucrat.
In April, Fukuda resigned from his post amid allegations he sexually harassed female reporters, with the abrupt resignation coming less than a year after he took on the role as the ministry's top bureaucrat and at a time when the ministry had been under fire for a number of improprieties, including the cronyism scandal implicating Abe.
In a prior blow to the ministry, Nobuhisa Sagawa, who previously headed the ministry's Financial Bureau, which oversaw the shady land sale, stepped down.
In terms of the falsification of ministry documents, Aso said recently he will voluntarily return part of his salary to take responsibility for the issue.
The ministry also went ahead and disciplined 20 officials, including former senior bureaucrat Sagawa, who was believed to have been one of the main instigators in "setting the direction" of the document tampering scandal.
The Abe administration in general has also been under the spotlight for, purportedly, deliberately covering up activity logs for Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) troops stationed in Iraq between 2004 and 2006.
The Defense Ministry finally said it had found the sensitive records after flip-flopping over the matter after first claiming they had been discarded.
