A former deputy mayor of Higashiura, Aichi Prefecture, convicted of inflating the town's population in a census, expressed his intention Monday not to appeal the recent ruling by the Nagoya District Court.
Hideo Ogisu, 63, who was sentenced Friday to a suspended four-month prison term, told reporters: "I have caused troubles to people involved. I didn't instruct to inflate population but will take responsibility for the consequences as deputy mayor."
The Nagoya District Court ruled that Ogisu instructed officials to pad the population by 303 in 2010 for a national census to clear the 50,000 threshold for upgrading its administrative status from town to city under the Local Autonomy Law.
Ogisu "impaired confidence in official statistics," the court said. It suspended the sentence for his "many years of service in smoothly operating the town government.